What do you want do? From, the sample you showed the XML doesn't contain HTML. It contains a <link> element with an href attributes that points to a URL that is HTML. I don't the Atom spec to know if the link element can have content. What do you want to do with the links? Do you want the URL from the href, the link text, the HTML file pointed to?

To get the URL from the href attribute, I think it is:

my $url = $elt->att('href');
[download]

$elt->text is the right way to get the text for the link, which is empty in this case.

For the HTML page pointed to, you will need to fetch it with LWP.