Maybe the idea is a bit sick, but it was the easy way out to avoid having to parse the nesting. The approach is not common: first, I convert the POD document to a piece of code that returns a single string, in this case HTML formatted.

Comments are welcome! 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# unfinished code, possibly insecure.


use strict;

sub AUTOLOAD  { shift };
sub pod_blank { "<p>" }
sub pod_code  { "<pre>$_[0]</pre>" }
sub pod_C     { "<tt>$_[0]</tt>" }
sub pod_I     { "<i>$_[0]</i>" }
sub pod_B     { "<b>$_[0]</b>" }
sub pod_S     { "<nobr>$_[0]</nobr>" }
sub pod_F     { "<tt>$_[0]</tt>" }
sub pod_Z     { "<span></span>" }
sub pod_L     { # XXX - needs a lot of work
    (split /\|/, shift)[0]
}
sub pod_E     {
       $_[0] =~ /^\d+$/ ? "&#$_[0];"
    :  { qw(lt < gt > sol / verbar |) }->{ $_[0] }
    || "&$_[0];"
}
sub pod_head1 { "<h1>$_[0]</h1>" }
sub pod_head2 { "<h2>$_[0]</h2>" }
sub pod_over  { "<ul>" }
sub pod_back  { "</ul>" }
sub pod_item  { "<li>$_[0]</li>" }

sub pod_PRE   {
    local $_ = shift;
    s/&/&amp;/g;
    $_;
}
sub pod_POST  {
    local $_ = shift;
    s/</&amp;lt;/g;
    s/>/&gt;/g;
    "<html><body>$_</body></html>";
}

###

my $pod = do {
    local $/ = undef;
    open my $fh, 'pod' or die $!;
    readline $fh;
};


$pod = pod_PRE($pod);

$pod =~ s/([\[\]\$\@\\])/\\$1/g;

$pod =~ s/^[^\n\S]*$/\${\\ pod_blank() }/gm;
$pod =~ s/^=(\w+)(?: ?(.*))?/\${\\ pod_$1(qq[$2]) }/gm;
$pod =~ s/^((?:[^\n\S].*\n?)+)/\${\\ pod_code(qq[$1]) }/gm;

for (2..6) {
    my $op = '<' x $_;
    my $cl = '>' x $_;
    while ($pod =~ /([IBSCLFXZE])$op (.*?) $cl/) {
        $pod =~ s//\${\\ pod_$1(qq[$2]) }/g;
    }
}
while ($pod =~ /([IBSCLFXZE])<(.*?)>/) {
    $pod =~ s//\${\\ pod_$1(qq[$2]) }/g;
}

$pod = 'qq[' . pod_POST($pod) . ']';
print eval $pod;

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- Yes, I reinvent wheels.
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