What is mission?

Mission is a command line tool and Rust library that reads HTML and turns it into clean readable text or structured data. It is built to be resilient: messy or broken HTML that would crash other parsers still produces usable output instead of an error, because it uses lenient, browser-like recovery for bad markup. At its core, Mission tokenizes HTML, builds a document structure from it, lets you query that structure with CSS selectors like the ones used in web design, and then renders the results as either readable text or JSON. It supports a wide range of CSS selectors, from simple tags and classes to attribute matching, sibling and child relationships, and pattern-based position selectors. There is no built in way to fetch a web page over the network. Instead, you feed it HTML from a file, from a pipe, or from a tool like curl that fetches the page for you, which keeps the tool small and safe when handling content from untrusted sources. Beyond the command line, installing Mission also gives you mission-mcp, a Model Context Protocol server. This lets AI coding agents and assistants call Mission directly to slice HTML with CSS selectors, so an agent can pull specific data like prices or links out of a page without loading the entire raw HTML into its context. Installation is a single line for macOS and Linux using a shell script, or a downloadable binary for Windows and other platforms, with no extra tools required. Rust users can also install it directly through cargo. The parser has zero runtime dependencies and forbids unsafe code throughout its codebase. It is released as free, open source software under a choice of the MIT or Apache 2.0 license, and is described as the open core of a separate paid platform called Mission Cloud that adds self healing extraction at scale.