Excellent advice and presentation++

Actually HTML::Template forces you to do such a 2-stage transformation.

If you want to avoid that, you could also use the HTML::Template-compatible HTML::Template::Compiled from tinita, which allows you to specify the innerContent by an additional TMPL-command, see HTC:INCLUDE

It will expand the embedded template(s) first and do the other template processing on the resulting joined template.

Not a big issue, but I like the feature.