G'day atcroft,

I agree with you: absolute URLs should not be used to link to the POD of related modules.

When I'm viewing a "See Also" section, and find a link to Some::Module, my expectations are that it's resolved something like the following (non-exhaustive list).

Source Site	Resolved Page
http://perldoc.perl.org/	http://perldoc.perl.org/Some/Module.html
http://search.cpan.org/	http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Some::Module
https://metacpan.org/	https://metacpan.org/pod/Some::Module

A continuity of flow, from one piece of documentation to the next, is preferable to jumping from one site (and its format) to another site (with a different format). Apart from the actual site format, I also may have settings with personal preferences which could be lost (typically not any sort of major problem; just a nuisance I could do without).

The reasons are very to similar to why absolute URLs on this site are frowned upon. If I'm reading, for instance, a http://www.perlmonks.com/ node, and follow a hard-coded link to a http://perlmonks.net/ node, I'll probably find I'm no longer logged in and I've lost all of my personal preferences (settings).

The only time that I'd use an absolute URL in POD, would be for links to additional (non-POD) discussion of the topic, information about a non-Perl dependency, and the like.