Between 1991 and 1998, I used Perl for a number of projects at the House of Commons when I was computerizing the production of "Hansard" the Official Report of the debates in Parliament, leading to the first publication of Hansard on the Web.

Apart from numerous system admin functions, I used Perl to automate the conversion of Debate text from MS-DOS Wordperfect to HTML marked-up text to create the first Web site in the UK parliament. Initially, this was on the Parliamentary Intranet only but, after the decision was taken to make the text of Hansard available on the Internet, the output from this system formed the basis of that Web site. All content conversion, element markup and index generation was automatic.