I am not sure I see where you are going with this argument.

I took the same approach here than what is used for the [KazooClient](http://kazoo.readthedocs.org/en/latest/api/client.html) (I actually stole the collect_host method there). Since both libraries may well be used together in many places (it is, in my case), I thought it would make sense to use the same kind of API.

Also, if you are using kafka command line tools, you'll pass a string in the same format as this.

Can you suggest a different API?