i downloaded something from perl.com that will allow me to embed perl in html files like javascript. it contains .pod files, which i can view in basic text editors, but there are tags in the file that are not processed by wordpad (windows) or pico (unix). what should i view it with in order to get these tags to work properly?
Use pod2text command. You can alternatively use pod2html, pod2man and pod2latex filters which is bundled with Perl distribution.