"Might be less common now" It is less necessary now. One of the most important parts of the HTML5 standards, IMHO, is that it specifies how to parse HTML that

"Might be less common now" It is less necessary now. One of the most important parts of the HTML5 standards, IMHO, is that it specifies how to parse HTML that doesn't conform to the standards in a standard way. In principle, every bag of bytes now has a standard-compliant way to parse it that every HTML5 parser should agree on. I don't use this to know how many edge cases the standard and/or implementations have, but it's a lot better than it used to be, and means that every HTML5 parser has many of the capabilities that Beautiful Soup used to (nearly-)uniquely have for parsing messy HTML. I suspect Beautiful Soup was a non-trivial aspect of how the decision to implement such a spec was decided upon. It proved the idea to be a very valuable one at a time when most languages lacked such a library. Basically, BS won so hard that while it wasn't necessarily directly adopted as a standard, the essence of it certainly was.