POD nested item list not rendered as expected

GrandFather has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm trying to create nested item lists using POD. The simple test POD:

=over 4

=item Item Entry - left justified, but as designed :(

item description - fine

=over 4

=item Nested item entry - not fine, not indented

nested item's description, ok wrt item, but indented to 8 expected

=back

=back
[download]

renders as

Item Entry - left justified, but as designed :(

    item description - fine

Nested item entry - not fine, not indented

    nested item's description, ok wrt item, but indented to 8 expected
[download]

where I expected the items to look like:

Item Entry - left justified, but as designed :(

    item description - fine

    Nested item entry - not fine, not indented
    
        nested item's description, ok wrt item, but indented to 8 expe
+cted
[download]

The issue seems to be that pod2html is generating

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

but if I replace that with

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">

(as generated by PerlMonks) the nesting is as I expect. Is this a problem with pod2html as shipped by ActiveState with their Perl v5.8.7 distribution, or is there something that I am missing?

DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

Comment on POD nested item list not rendered as expected Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: POD nested item list not rendered as expected by doom (Deacon) on Jun 19, 2007 at 06:54 UTC
Unfortunately, pod2html is very stale, and effectively broken (it's a minor scandal that the perl porters haven't gotten around to endorsing a replacement for it). You should almost certainly try again with Pod::Simple::HTMLBatch, which is what's actually used to generate the html you see on cpan.org. I wrote up some commentary on it awhile back: Review Pod::Simple::HTMLBatch	[reply]
Re: POD nested item list not rendered as expected by ysth (Canon) on Jun 19, 2007 at 03:58 UTC
The html I see is really broken; I'm surprised you get anything at all when claiming XHTML. The inner list follows rather than is nested in the outer list's dd tag (giving a dl directly inside a dl, which is verboten) and there's a bonus closing-li tag before the closing-dl tags.	[reply]
Re^2: POD nested item list not rendered as expected by GrandFather (Saint) on Jun 19, 2007 at 04:19 UTC
so the simple fix (apart from updating Perl) is to edit Perl/Lib/Pod/Html.pm to "fix" the header generated by the `print HTML <<END_OF_HEAD;` heredoc by altering the header text to match the second header given above. It may be that that is fixed in some fashion in POD::Html.pm 1.0504 which seems to ship with Perl 5.8.8 rather than the 1.0503 version shipped with Perl 5.8.7 which I'm currently using. I notice though that the header text in the heredoc is unchanged. DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: POD nested item list not rendered as expected by ysth (Canon) on Jun 19, 2007 at 04:45 UTC
I wouldn't count on all browsers indenting the way you want, even with HTML 4.01 headers. And I tried with 5.8.8's Pod::Html 1.0504.	[reply]
Re: POD nested item list not rendered as expected by Anonymous Monk on Jun 19, 2007 at 04:07 UTC
Upgrade `perl -MPod::Html -e"die Pod::Html->VERSION" perl -MPod::Html -e'die Pod::Html->VERSION'` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: POD nested item list not rendered as expected by Anonymous Monk on Jun 19, 2007 at 04:09 UTC
The latest http://public.activestate.com/pub/apc/perl-current/lib/Pod/Html.pm	[reply]


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