Mental note: Never, ever, design a website in a propietary development environment again. I finally grok the genuine clue behind XML: EXPLICIT STATE. No more “oh, that’s that way because it’s the 839th bit with two NULLs” before it. No more “it’s that way because the operation eighty cycles ago was a NOP.” Forget eXtensible, or eXtreme, or whatever. XML is explicit, headache free state management.

Why do I say all this? Because I’m presently going through some ridiculous hacks to extract the structure out of data formatted by NetObjects Fusion. So far, the best method seems to be:

• Use lynx -dump -nolist to create a reasonably legible text version of my documents. It’s not as utterly beautiful as links, which has suffered for no other reason than its homonymous with lynx, but it’s got a dump mode which I haven’t hacked into links yet.
• Use txt2html to intelli gently extract the structure that lynx found from the original “fused” document into reasonably simple HTML.
• If necessary, use html2txt to convert back into text, and use the RAW mode David gave me to automatically emit a paragraph tag any time two carriage returns are detected in sequence.
• Manually add the various images, boldfaces, italicizations, and preformatting tags as needed.

This is of course, as they say in the industry, a ridiculous hack that barely has enough elegance to be mentioned in public, but it works. And in the end…that’s more than some people can say(sigh).