I don't know the answer to your =head? question, but I can offer a pet peeve.

In POD, lines with leading whitespace are interpreted literally; that is, no formatting is applied to sections of text with leading whitespace. This is primarily for code examples and the like. However, sometimes it is abused, and the entire POD is fixed width and generally painful to read.

For example: Astro::Coord

Don't do that!
Matt

P.S. The html via search.cpan.org masks the horror. Try it via perldoc on a 80-character wide terminal session to truly feel the pain.