Principle:PrefectHQ Prefect HTML Fetching
| Metadata | |
|---|---|
| Sources | Prefect Tasks |
| Domains | Web_Scraping, Data_Engineering |
| Last Updated | 2026-02-09 00:00 GMT |
Overview
A pattern for reliably downloading HTML content from web pages with automatic retries for transient network failures.
Description
HTML Fetching is the network I/O step in web scraping pipelines. It separates the concern of downloading raw HTML from parsing it, allowing each to be retried independently. Network calls are inherently unreliable due to timeouts, rate limits, and temporary server errors. By wrapping the HTTP GET call in a Prefect task with retries, failed fetches are automatically retried without re-parsing already-fetched content.
Usage
Use this pattern as the first step in a web scraping pipeline when you need to download HTML pages from URLs and want automatic retry handling for network failures.
Theoretical Basis
Separation of fetch and parse follows the Single Responsibility Principle applied to I/O-bound vs CPU-bound operations. Network fetch is independently retryable because it is idempotent (GET requests return the same content). Parse operations are deterministic and do not need retries.