A limited solution (no table or frame support) is the Cookbook's Recipe 20.5:

use strict;

use HTML::FormatText;
use HTML::Parse;

my $data = do {local $/;<DATA>};
my $html = parse_html($data);

my $formatter = HTML::FormatText->new(
   leftmargin  => 0,
   rightmargin => 50,
);

my $ascii = $formatter->format($html);

print "$ascii\n";

__DATA__
<p class="fol">Here's some text that goes in the body
of the article. It has some list items like this:</p> <ul>
<li>List item one</li>
<li>List item two</li>
</ul>
[download]

This generates the following output:

Here's some text that goes in the body of the
article. It has some list items like this:

  * List item one

  * List item two

I have found that converting HTML to text is hard, and the best free tool i have found so far is lynx -dump. Of course, the most optimal solution is to never mix presentation with data! :)

Update: in case you are wondering where that extra bullet came from, it is the result of the closing li tags. Looks like HTML::FormatText could use an upgrade to support XHTML. -- good catch Hero Zzyzzx! ;) I fixed this typo since hacker requested i fix the original. For historical purposes, the first list item looked like so: <li>List item one<li>.

jeffa

Remember kids, just say no to mixing data and presentation!