As I recall, we tried a module based on HTML::Parser but had to drop it because it was way too slow (10-times slower, IIRC).

The speed has everything to do with the complexity of your parser. If you don't need to follow specifics, and don't need to implement the usual browser quirks, a single regex is often a lot more efficient. It's up to the end user to benchmark it. Unfortunately, most novices don't know how to write the regex, don't know how to write an HTML::Parser based scripts and don't know how to benchmark.

Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }