If you would have been using DocBook, then your problem could have been easily solved. Look, for example, here (Chapter 1 of "DocBook: The Definitive Guide" by Norman Walsh and Leonard Muellner). Scroll down to "Marked sections" to see an example (specifying Draft parts of the document). You can also use the rest of the book to find a number of good reasons to use DocBook instead of HTML. :)

My 2 cents.

This may be overkill, but for this I would use HTML::Mason to mark up your pages. It is designed for dynamic HTML generation ala PHP, with perl code being able to be inlined in your HTML.

It can be called from the command line, and a script to render out your documentation shouldn't be too tough.

Mason calls each HTML file a 'component', and components can have attributes. I would envisage your problem being solved by using the attribute tags to define what the file has in it, then have a list that goes through components looking for matching attributes to what you want.

++ to you both for excellent advice. Looks like html::mason may be what I am after, I have just started wading through the documentation now...

Thanks heaps,
Gerard

What your quest basically comes down to is separation of data and presentation. Both Mason and TT2 (and all the others) are capable of making this possible (offline/online/whatever).

At the moment I would lean towards http://tt2.org/download/Template-Skeleton-0.01.tar.gz (the driving force behind http://tt2.org/tt3/, http://wardley.org) as an amazingly easy to grow starting point (see the oscon2003 "tutorial" above). Grab yourself an INSERT directive and you've got data you're maintaining in one place automagically inserted wherever you need it.

I would also suggest a Wiki (such as http://kwiki.org/, CGI::Wiki::Simple...) as means of user contributed documentation.