Question: From what I can understand of LSB documentation, neither wget or netcat are standard tools always available in an LSB environment.

Is there some other way to make a http request without being dependent on anything else than LSB?  

What would be the most safe tool to be dependent on if I want to make it as simple as possible for users of my tool?

Answer: 
I see that the LSB includes both Perl and Python...Python, at least, includes http tools in the standard library. I didn't investigate to see if the LSB mandates libwww-perl. 

If you don't want to write anything yourself and you're happy with output to `stdout`, you can do this:

```
python -murllib http://example.com/

```

And if you're feeling really motivated, you can [write a simple http client in bash](http://web.archive.org/web/20120818034606/http://shudder.daemonette.org:80/source/BashNP-Guide.txt).
LSB is just Linux - and that might be an embedded device with not network at all. So there is no need to define HTTP in LSB.

Apart from that `wget` should be pretty standard in most distributions (e.g. SuSE uses wget in SuSEregister). Another tool might be `curl` - but you can not depend on these tools being available.

So if you want to use it - build a proper package and define a dependency (required: wget).

I see no other way for this.