Perl - pod and HTML

[Wolfgang Laun <Wolfgang.Laun@alcatel.at>]

Greetings,

Sorry to bother you - there seems to be no other way to get the answers
to my questions.

The situation:
Having decided to establish Perl (and Perl/Tk) as the major platform for
tooling in our SW development environment I launched a little training
program. Perl is a complex language, and even those with some experience
have to refer frequently to the man/pod pages. I feel that having HTML
documentation would be a valuable asset and help to overcome some of the
difficulties.

So I tried pod2html (the very latest version on CPAN). Later I learned
from Nick Ing-Simmon's work on podtohtml (which he himselfs terms a
"prototype") and tried that, comparing the results.

The questions:
What is the intended behaviour of C<> (and L<>)?
- perlpod does not say that it is a link.
- pod2html tries hard to derive source anchors to =items from the C<>
text - very useful for perlfunc/var/re/op - but podtohtml does not use
C<> as a link.
- There is L<page/ident> as a link to an item on some page, but there is
no shortcut for omitting the page - does this indicate that
C<...> could/should be such a shortcut?
- What about L<> with a "real" URL such  as http://...?

In addition to trying to improve pod2html (Perlbug ticket 20000111.002),
and before learning about Nick's work, I had written a Pod parser and
80% of a HTML generator (derived from a generator base class) - open is
part of the link handling and some overall .pm/.pod file handling. So
I'm pretty sure that I can create all the HTML I want, in a shape that
is good to use and in time for our purposes here (M2/2000). -
Considering other efforts, would this be of interest to the Perl Public?
Is there someone (e.g. some CPAN tester?) who would care to cast a
critical eye on this?

Please send me a few pointers...

Regards,
-Wolfgang

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