OK, so there were already a thousand solutions for converting pod to HTML, but I wasn't especially happy with any of them. Things I wanted were:

• Clean-looking XHTML and/or HTML5 output.
• Unicode support. ☻
• Good syntax highlighting for Perl code samples within the pod.
• Links to metacpan.org by default rather than search.cpan.org.

And so I've cobbled together a solution using Pod::Simple, PPI::HTML, HTML::HTML5::Parser, HTML::HTML5::Writer, XML::LibXML::PrettyPrint and Moo, and released it as TOBYINK::Pod::HTML.

This is my take on the version debate. Bear in mind that I'm not a p5p nor a Perl 6 developer, so I don't get a vote. I can still have an opinion though...

Perl 6 represents the future of Perl. But given the amount of time taken to get to where it is today, and the amount of work still needed before it can be put forward as a serious replacement for Perl 5, it realistically represents the distant future of Perl.