When Guile started back in the mid-nineties, the GNU system was still focused on producing a good POSIX implementation. This is why Guile's POSIX support is good, and has been so for a while.
But times change, and in a way these days the web is the new POSIX: a standard and a motley set of implementations on which much computing is done. So today's Guile also supports the web at the programming language level, by defining common data types and operations for the technologies underpinning the web: URIs, HTTP, and XML.
It is particularly important to define native web data types. Though
the web is text in motion, programming the web in text is like
programming with goto: muddy, and error-prone. Most current
security problems on the web are due to treating the web as text instead
of as instances of the proper data types.
In addition, common web data types help programmers to share code.
Well. That's all very nice and opinionated and such, but how do I use the thing? Read on!