httplib is much better documented and seems so much better put together than urllib2. Am I missing something? The majority of applications and Python packages seem to favor urllib2 over httplib, and I don’t understand why.

Just compare the documentation for the two:
– httplib: http://docs.python.org/library/httplib.html
– urllib2: http://docs.python.org/library/urllib2.html

Is there a reason why a lot of people seem to favor the latter?