Thnx for the links. I also found a use.perl.org entry reviewing Pod::POM::Web with a screenshot link. And then found several other solutions on CPAN. I'd forgotten about the Pod::POM namespace.

But based on what I've seen thus far, Pod::ProjectDocs comes closest to what I'm after: a minimal solution to format the complete POD for a project, and that I can subclass for some add'l features I need. I don't really need/want a full webserver based solution, just the docs, and I'd rather not have to navigate an entire document model. With ProjectDocs, I can just grab or filter out what I need with a few regexen. Then just copy it up to a website for public consumption.

Which leads me to think I've got 2 distinct issues:

1. The general problem of converting nested HTML lists to a JS tree
2. The specific issue of easing navigation of POD project docs

(Note that if the nested lists were in their own div, or if the outermost list had a unique ID, the conversion could be done entirely in Javascript. But that much recursive Javascript in the browser makes me nervous).

After some minor changes to my HTML nested lists hack, I successfully applied it to some other non-POD web pages in dire need of refreshing/easier navigation. Which also leads me to think that using HTML nested lists might be a nice notation for generating JS tree widgets, since the HTML would be pretty standard, whereas there are about 1,000,000 different JS tree widget APIs roaming the web.