It's already a near impossible task if you know Perl and PDF very well.

Talking about cheating... I suppose you're not converting other people's PDF files to html, because that would be, you know, evil... So if you're trying to convert your own PDF files to html, why not go one step earlier, and produce html from the source file, maybe even from within the program used to create the layout, from which the PDF is generated? Program control scripting (OLE, Applescript) might be an option.