Indeed, CGI.pm has grown beyond the CGI-stuff it does so well and I am not sure that this evolution is all for the best.

I had started a dynamic web-site with Perl-scripts which output the data as pure XML.

XSLT-stylesheets transform this XML (originally client-side, but now server-side through AxKit and Sablotron) into HTML.

I obtained thus a clean division between logic (the Perl scripts) and presentation (the XSLT and CSS stylesheets).However, then The Powers That Be wanted some form handling capacity into the website and They wanted it yesterday.

Although it is not impossible to code your forms into XML and have them transformed into regular HTML through XSLT, this is not something you would like to do in a hurry.

So I called CGI.pm to the rescue.

The basic CGI-stuff works like a charm, but then I got tempted to use the HTML-generating stuff as well. Finally, I was able to combine the HTML-stuff of CGI.pm into XML and XSLT, but it is *ugly* and if it was not for lack of time, I would go back and rewrite the XSLT-stylesheets to handle all forms-related things and forget all about the CGI.pm HTML-generating functions.

What we really need is a Pure::CGI::Lite module; nothing more, nothing less.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law