Take a good look around CPAN and you should find CGI::FormMagick. Here's a snippet from the POD documentation, which I think sums up what you're trying to achieve:

FormMagick is a toolkit for easily building fairly complex form-based web applications. It allows the developer to specify the structure of a multi-page "wizard" style form using XML, then display that form using only a few lines of Perl.

The version that is there on CPAN now was released on the 24th June 2002, and there is also an example and a tutorial on how to use it. This should overcome your problem of having to "rewrite it anyway to bring it up to 2002 module functionality"

- wil