I’ve spent some time messing around with perl yesterday and today. I’ve been trying to find a way that I can edit a page using FrontPage — my usual HTML editor — and do footnotes inline, using <ref>…</ref> tags, just as if I were in Wikipedia. A perl script then reads the file, strips out the references, inserts a [1], [2], and dumps all the footnotes at the end.
It’s sort of working. It’s not that complex a script, although if I didn’t hate perl so much it would probably be done by now. The language always fights you, unless you immerse yourself in it, which of course occasional users like myself never do.
It still needs a bit of work, tho.