My goal was to find a simple way to extract the pod from a tree of multiple *.pm/*.pod files and convert it into a tree of html files. And if you're nodding your head saying "Of course, that's so simple!", you probably haven't looked into this very closely.

Summary: Pod::Html and pod2html are known to be very weak, limited tools (and ditto pods2html, which is closer to what I needed). There are many alternative methods, none of which have become standards as of yet. My suggestion is to keep an eye on Sean M. Burke: his Pod::Simple::HTMLBatch turned out to be almost exactly what I was looking for: it crunches the documentation for a tree of modules, and generates readable html, converting L<> links into relative html links.

An honorable mention also goes to Mark Overmeer who looks like he's developing some interesting ideas with his OODoc (some custom extentions to pod markup to deal with large OO projects).

By the way: it's a funny thing, but pod processing modules almost always seem to have very sketchy pod...