Getting started

I've been poring over the libwww docs for a few days now and aside
from the occasional glimmer of faint understanding, I'm not making
much progress. My goal is to write a C subroutine that will take a
URL parameter, and return a buffer containing plain ascii text for
the HTML that's at the URL.  I'm thinking I should use HTMLToPlain
that's in html.c, but beyond that I'm lost as to how to initialize
the library and  various data types,  and how to receive the plain
ascii output.
Help!
Howard Rubin