This documentation format reminds me strongly of the one used by RoboDoc which I happen to like a lot since it can be used in almost any programming language (Perl, Java, C/C++, etc) and can generate output in HTML, XHTML, RTF and LaTeX.

If you can't convert your group to POD (which I agree is best for Perl programmers), at least it might be worthwhile to introduce them to RoboDoc since without much change of format and effort will allow automatic generation of documentation.

Hope this helps, -gjb-