"Universal newlines" of PEP 278 does not seem to have a central, linkable description within the documentation.  In particular, there does not seem to be a glossary entry or any index entries for it.

The main documentation seems to be in the middle of the documentation for the open() built-in function:

http://docs.python.org/dev/library/functions.html?highlight=open#open

But this does not feature prominently when searching for universal newlines in the "Quick Search".

This would allow us, for example, to reference and link to an explanation of universal newlines in the documentation for str.splitlines():

http://docs.python.org/dev/library/stdtypes.html#str.splitlines

I would be happy to provide a patch.