The only hard part is remembering which of the less common but harmless and useful HTML tags don't work.

No, no, no. The hard part is finding out which elements are named the same in both HTML and Perlmonks, but act differently. <code> for instance means something else in HTML than in Perlmonks. But I still haven't figured out how the <a> element is working on Perlmonks. Sometimes, it creates a link. Sometimes it appears as is.

That, and remembering the entity for escaping the left square bracket. (I usually just put code tags around it. Easier to remember.)

Easier to remember, but not easier to type. Having to type 13 extra characters to be able to type a common character in Perl isn't what I say "easy". At least in POD, you only need three extra characters: C<[>. And in POD, you don't even have to put any markup around a function() or a $variable. POD knows.

If you want to see some needlessly complicated and gratuitously different site markup, have a look at Wikipedia sometime.

Actually, I've contributed some bits to Wikipedia the last week. I vastly prefer the [[link]] syntax over [link] as it means one can use unescaped left brackets if they aren't followed by another left bracket. [..] is common when discussing perl. [[..]] is a rare appearance in Perl code. I also prefer mechanisms like ''foo'' or *bar* to make something emphasized/italics or strong/bold, like Wikis or news/mail readers do.

Abigail