Thanks to pip I often don't even bother with the Python stdlib for crusty things like one-off web scrapes or XML parsing. Here's a recent example where I wanted to read some attributes out of some remote XML and did it with requests and PyQuery rather than urllib and xml:

    _domains_text = requests.get(API_URL + "/domainlist.xml").content
    _domains_db = pyquery.PyQuery(_domains_text)
    
    DOMAINS = [d.values()[0] for d in _domains_db('domain')]