Yes it is very simple, even simplistic - by intent. It wasn't intended as a final solution but rather a stop gap (or scaffolding as you will) to address the major source of pain. Even if you were to reuse code from pod's implementation, I think you would find that applying the pod approach will require a certain amount of tweaking (see addendum below). Having a lot of DWIM ideas is great, but each idea adds implementation time however short. It adds up. And at least a few of those may turn into a "small matter of programming". I'm just saying while the kinks of those ideas are being worked out and tested, a very simple solution would buy us a great deal.

The worst effects of this simple solution is that (a) we get ugly Courrier text instead of Times New Roman (b) normal text may look choppy because we lose the ability to wrap paragraphs (c) downloads may include a bunch of irrelevant stuff that needs to be deleted or commented out.

But at least we will be able to read the post. Most of the unreadability in unformatted posts (and I mean here text with *no* tags except "pre") comes from the fact that unformatted text collapses all runs of whitespace outside "pre" tags into a single space. This makes code samples look like one long breathless mess. Only an obfu expert can read that.

Best, beth

Addendum: Although Pod has an algorithm for distinguishing text from code, even without markup, we can't just use it "as is". It relies on the assumption that the user will have normal text flush at the beginning of the line and code will be indented. This is often not the case if the user is cut&pasting from their code files. Here is a sample of code from node Can't call method "getAttribute" followed by output from pod2html sample.pod > foo.out. As you can see the output is unreadable:

# this line added to bypass pod2html's error checking
=head Dummy title
# remainder is taken from node id=781506
#!/usr/bin/perl

#################################################################
# Yahoo Weather Rss Information Atomizer
# Version 0.7.1
# Loud-Soft.com
# Provided As Is
#################################################################

use strict;
use XML::XPath;
use LWP::Simple;
use XML::XPath::XMLParser;
use Getopt::Long;
use File::Copy;

#################################################################
# Variables
#################################################################
# Constants (Change these to localize)
my $zipcode = "60642";
my $unit = "F";
my $scripthome = "/Library/prlprograms/yweather.pl";
my $icondir = $scripthome."images/";
my $datadir = $scripthome."data/";
my $datafile = $datadir."weather.xml";
my $imagefile = $icondir."weather.png";

# Constants (Do not change these)
my $pre="yweather";
my $uri="http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/ns/rss/1.0";
my $url="http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=$zipcode&u=$unit";
my %data;
my $xp;
[download]

The output looks like this:

Dummy title

#!/usr/bin/perl

################################################################# # Yahoo Weather Rss Information Atomizer # Version 0.7.1 # Loud-Soft.com # Provided As Is #################################################################

use strict; use XML::XPath; use LWP::Simple; use XML::XPath::XMLParser; use Getopt::Long; use File::Copy;

################################################################# # Variables ################################################################# # Constants (Change these to localize) my $zipcode = ``60642''; my $unit = ``F''; my $scripthome = ``/Library/prlprograms/yweather.pl''; my $icondir = $scripthome.``images/''; my $datadir = $scripthome.``data/''; my $datafile = $datadir.``weather.xml''; my $imagefile = $icondir.``weather.png'';

# Constants (Do not change these) my $pre=``yweather''; my $uri=``http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/ns/rss/1.0''; my $url=``http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=$zipcode&u=$unit''; my %data; my $xp;