Two modules that might do something in the general direction of your wishes (formatting text without special directives or with simple directives) are HTML::FromText and the various Wiki text formatters (have a look at WikiFormat for example). A Wiki formatter in Perl could be Text::WikiFormat by chromatic. I've always liked the way Wikis format their text, but I don't know if the results are good enough for your needs. Matts also has some Wiki modules on the CPAN.

My guess is that you'll have to take (at least) one of these modules, and rip out the HTML generating part and replace it with a generating part of your liking (or directly turn to Matts SAX drivers for his Wiki stuff).

perl -MHTTP::Daemon -MHTTP::Response -MLWP::Simple -e ' ;    # The  
$d = new HTTP::Daemon and fork and getprint $d->url and exit;#spider
($c = $d->accept())->get_request(); $c->send_response( new   #in the
HTTP::Response(200,$_,$_,qq(Just another Perl hacker\n))); ' #  web
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I'm already using (a patched version of) HTML::FromText for formatting plain text; sadly, it doesn't DTRT with other content, like Perl code. The Wiki formatters look cool, though; thanks for the pointer.

HTML::FromText takes a very free-form approach to marking up text; I'm looking for something just a bit more structured. Perhaps the Wiki formatters will help me out.

--
The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!
:wq

Stas Backman used it for DocSet (the name might change..) which is used to create the new mod_perl Site.

And I wrote a very simple POD2slides translator for doing presentations with HTML (see here (it's in german, look at the links at the end of the page..)

--
#!/usr/bin/perl
for(ref bless{},just'another'perl'hacker){s-:+-$"-g&&print$_.$/}
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Clarification:

I'm writing content for a website in mostly-plaintext files. The first paragraph is headers (think email), containing metadata. The rest is content. Right now, all of the content goes through HTML::FromText to turn it into nice pretty web-friendly markup. Unfortunately, it's difficult to do things like post Perl code sippets with this method, because they end up getting parsed like they're plain text by HTML::FromText. (Yes, there's a document-wide switch to text2html to treat indented paragraphs as code; 95% of the time, I don't want that.)

What I want is a nice way to say "this chunk of text is plaintext, and should be marked up by HTML::FromText; this chunk is Perl, and should be marked up by perltidy; this chunk is C, and should be marked up by <foo>", and so on. I want to do this in as transparent a manner as possible; if I wanted to write my content in some heavyweight markup language, I'd use HTML and skip the middleman.

I'm thinking that POD might be a useful way of doing this: I could use one of the many POD modules to chunk my input, and POD has a nice, minimal syntax.

Update: Looks like POD's the way to go. Thanks Aristotle and domm!

--
The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!
:wq

POD allows this with the for (or begin) directives; something like

=for email

Usenet style stuff here

=end email

=for perltidy

some_code_here();

=end perltidy
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See perlpod. I haven't fiddled with the Pod::Parser or siblings to know how much effort it would be to actually implement this though.

Makeshifts last the longest.