This problem looks tailor-made for my HTML::TokeParser::Simple module, when combined with HTML::Tagset. The following test will demonstrate:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;
use HTML::Tagset;

my $html = <<'END_HTML';
<a href="mylink">text1</a>
<this is normal text>
END_HTML

my $p = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new( \$html );

while ( my $token = $p->get_token ) {
    next if ! $token->is_text 
              and 
              exists $HTML::Tagset::isKnown{ $token->return_tag };
    print $token->return_text;
}
[download]

Result:

text1
<this is normal text>

Cheers,
Ovid

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