html retrieval & manipulation

hello,

for many years, I used WebL (http://research.compaq.com/SRC/WebL/) to
retrieve html pages and manipulate tthe to extract informations. but
this product seems no longer supported and hardly understand HTML4 :(

as Mozilla offer some similar functionalities (DOM+javascript), I
imaginated to use DOM+javascript as a poor-man WebL. but I do not know
how can I do it outside of a browser context.

is it possible to load html pages and manipulate them with
javascript+DOM in a standalone way ?

TIA,
Pierre.