Here's an even better (I think) implementation of isstring() for
publish.py -- ie. it should work with string subclasses in Python 2.2:

  def isstring (x):
      if sys.hexversion >= 0x02020000:    # Python 2.2 or greater
          return isinstance(x, (types.StringType, types.UnicodeType))
      else:
          return type(x) in (types.StringType, types.UnicodeType)

The rest of my patch stands.

        Greg