That's looks correct for me.

They are there for two diferente ends:

case 1: name/ident
In this situation is expected L<page/itemname> where page can be empty (which is the case)

case 2: name/"section name"
In this case it is expected a sectionname, quoted. for some reason (because if there isn't a item with a given name Pod::Html will look for a section with the same name, the author (in his own comments) even though this should be a "section", we go for ident first. It works, as well as using a section name without quotes, that would in the previous case, and is treated as a ident, and then as a section if there is no ident with such name.

case 3: something that have a space
In this case Pod::Html assumes that we are looking for a section, as pages don't have whitespaces in names.

case 4: everything else
A link to anything that don't have spaces, nor a slash is a link to a page.

I think that is missing a case, that could be managed before case 3 with:

} elsif ($par=~m{"(.*)"}) {
  ($page,$section)=('',$1); #In this case, it looks to me
      # that the pod author forgot the initial / but is
      # trying to link to a section in corrent page
      # (quoted name).
[download]

I'm also not seeing why the quotes in the second case are optional. Without garantees, my final patch would look like this:

--- Html.pm     2005-07-01 14:48:23.000000000 +0100
+++ Html.pm.new 2005-07-01 23:07:35.000000000 +0100
@@ -1549,15 +1549,20 @@
        my( $page, $section, $ident );

        # check for link patterns
-       if( $par =~ m{^([^/]+?)/(?!")(.*?)$} ){     # name/ident
+       if( $par =~ m{^([^/]+)?/(?!")(.*?)$} ){     # name/ident
             # we've got a name/ident (no quotes)
             ( $page, $ident ) = ( $1, $2 );
             ### print STDERR "--> L<$par> to page $page, ident $ident
+\n";

-       } elsif( $par =~ m{^(.*?)/"?(.*?)"?$} ){ # [name]/"section"
-            # even though this should be a "section", we go for ident
+ first
-           ( $page, $ident ) = ( $1, $2 );
+       } elsif( $par =~ m{^(.*)?/"(.*?)"$} ){ # [name]/"section"
+            # we've got a name/"section"
+           ( $page, $section ) = ( $1, $2 );
             ### print STDERR "--> L<$par> to page $page, section $sec
+tion\n";
+
+       } elsif ( $par =~ m{^"(.*?)"$} ){ # "section"
+           # we've got a section without a pagename
+           ( $page, $section ) = ('',$1);
+            ### print STDERR "--> L<$par> to void page, section $sect
+ion\n";

        } elsif( $par =~ /\s/ ){  # this must be a section with missin
+g quotes
            ( $page, $section ) = ( '', $par );
[download]

But, maybe I'm missing something that Tom Christiansen found. I don't know.