GSoC Status Update

Hello all,

I am sending my status report early because I will not be able to send it at
the beginning of next week.

Although one could not tell from the most recent
commits<https://github.com/marcgreen>I have pushed this past week, I
have gotten a lot done. This is because I
have found out what I have been doing is a colossal waste of time.

More specifically, at the beginning of this week I was in the mindset that I
needed to subclass Pod::Simple::Xhtml to modify it in order to resolve L<>
directives to local links (as opposed to online links, as it does by
default). So I went on my merry way, creating the module, tossing ideas back
and forth about how to best achieve the desired result, until about 2 hours
ago. I realized that it will be a pain pursuing my original plan (which was
to use Pod::Simple::Search within my subclass of ::Xhtml in order to resolve
the links). Consequently, I realized I need not subclass Xhtml to resolve
links locally, the module itself provides methods to alter the URL of all
links. It's embarrassing that I never thought to use said methods before,
but oh well, the damage is done.

Not only that, but I took on way too much when I was subclassing ::Xhtml.
For some reason I thought it would be a great idea to scrap everything in
Pod::Html and rewrite it using my subclass. I came to my senses today and
realized I only need to have a drop in replacement for Pod::Html's pod
parser and xhtml formatter. What a relief!

But this week wasn't really a waste of time. Besides the obvious reason of
finding a good way not to resolve links locally, I learned about the
internals of Pod::Html much more (though not enough, yet). I cleaned out all
of Pod::Html's old code, and started setting up to use ::Xhtml and ::Search.
I also removed the --header feature of Pod::Html that was needlessly
distracting me. I plan on adding it, in addition to other features I have
removed, back, once I get the bare bones of the conversion to ::Xhtml done.

I won't have a lot of time next week to work on this, (vacation :D), but
when I get back I plan on, in no particular order:

- using Pod::Simple::Search to resolve L<> directives
- investigating how Pod::Html resolves other links (RFC links, perl.* links
in verbatim text, etc)
- write several test cases for Pod::Html, both to understand how it works
and to have for when I convert it

Thank you,
Marc