Research on information extraction from Web pages (wrapping) has seen much activity in recent times (particularly systems implementations), but little work has been done on formally studying the expressiveness of the formalisms proposed or on the theoretical foundations of wrapping. In this paper, we first study monadic datalog as a wrapping language (over ranked or unranked tree structures). Using previous work by Neven and Schwentick, we show that this simple language is equivalent to full...