Of course people have thought about it; just off the top of my head I can think of
TK::HTML. However, the module is EXTREMLEY hard to use. One of the reasons many people are discouraged from creating open source web browsers is because of the sheer difficulty in parsing bad html. One of the key things IE/Mozilla/Opera have going for them is their ability to parse extremely bad html markup into decent looking pages. Parsing html isn't easy; anyone who has tried without using
HTML::Parser will tell you that. While I think a decent one can be written in perl, it would be much larger than a one person project; it would take a community effort (probably a
sourceforged one) to be have the manpower to do it.