POD to CPAN to POD?

[jgamble]

Before I get into the gist of my question, I'd like to direct your attention to Math::Fractal::Noisemaker, in particular the NOISE TYPES section. If you are viewing this in HTML, you will see nice graphics demonstrating the different types of fractal noise.

This was a nice idea that I immediately wanted to steal, so I looked at the author's POD code, and found that between "=begin HTML" and "=end HTML" sections he put an img tag pointing to jpeg on a github server.

Irrationally, I found this to be a little disappointing. To my mind, it would seem more elegant to have a CPAN document refer back to CPAN instead of a separate site. Thinking it over, I wondered if it made sense. Could a POD parser refer back to the module it was documenting? If I put an "images" directory in my package, could I have an HTML tag referring back to a directory that doesn't exist until PAUSE creates it?

I expect the answer is "no" (or even "hell no"), but I thought I'd run the idea by the perlmonk community. Stupid idea? Nice idea that's too tricky to get implemented? Or... possible to do?

[Anonymous Monk]

Some thoughts
• search.cpan.org is not CPAN, it is the official search engine, but there are others, like Kobesearch, MetaCPAN
• PAUSE does not create html, see for yourself http://github.com/andk/pause
• don't put an images directory in your package, use File::ShareDir and File::ShareDir::Install instead
• A POD parser can do anything :) so yes, this is trivial to implement, but only practical if it is based on standard tools like File::ShareDir, say

  =for image dist_file( 'File-ShareDir', 'images/foo.jpg' )
  
  =for image module_file( 'File::ShareDir', 'images/foo.jpg' )
  
  =for image class_file( 'File::ShareDir', 'images/foo.jpg' )
  

  It would also be trivial to assume a dist or module or class based on the current dist/file being processed (also assuming a standard naming convention, which isn't universally followed), but it doesn't have to :)

  And it would also be trivial to update Pod::Simple::HTML and maybe Pod::Html to handle =for image (?:dist|module|class)_file\( (?:'[^']+\'|\s+|,)+ \) for end users (me, you)

  Not sure how search.cpan.org works exactly, but if it doesn't install modules (and it appears it doesn't) or run Makefile.PL && make (maybe it doesn't), then CPAN::Meta::Spec ( http://module-build.sourceforge.net/META-spec-v1.4.html ) might need to be updated to determine the sharedir info

• you can preview/test your pod with search.cpan.org online pod previewer http://search.cpan.org/pod2html
• Try it with inlined img/pod file to cpan :) pod and images/Re^2: Inline images in POD, it worked in my test (with modern browser)

  =head1 NAME
  
  pod-img.pod - example embedding html data uri image in pod
  
  
  =head1 THE IMAGE
  
  =for html <p><img src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAA
  +BQAAAAVCAIAAADJt1n/AAAAAXNSR0IArs4c6QAAAARnQU1BAACxjwv8YQUAAAAgY0hSTQ
  +AAeiYAAICEAAD6AAAAgOgAAHUwAADqYAAAOpgAABdwnLpRPAAAAKdJREFUOE/Fk2sOgCA
  +Mg/HqxpuZeC1sqI5ReSh/JATB7Os6HkuMMUw3wNMttMhjP7Z16+vWYWDWO3yGUTgAG5mZ
  +vcVfMIMAIA4jd9D4AWwAJYj5Q6jyWrO3yjkL8TD+cKmwVC6w2SlgaH3qCpfGmlrpRl6xt
  +/v0ZXKbVL28hc1LTnVLV2z7zGLkucy7bdo+SDKLtMK+SKl8nFngD5nnz7n/bgcP4wf4BN
  +5NffCErP3uAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC">
  
  
  =cut