which tool may i use to make beautiful perl cgi web pages and then insert perl code where i want too?
Perl or no Perl, if you want beautiful pages you'll write
them by hand (possibly using an editor with helps, such
as cperl-mode in Emacs). The automatic page generation
tools (Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Composer, and their ilk)
invariably produce very messy code, code that's not
maintainable, code that's needlessly bloated, code that's
impossible for a human to read if you need to look at
it to debug a problem, code that relies so extensively
on physical markup (e.g., font tags) that you must
abandon all pretense of accessibility,
code that won't validate in a
billion years, code that relies so heavily on browser
quirks that when the next versions of the major browsers
come out it will probably break and you'll have to
redo it all. The advantages of these tools mostly
involve people who don't know very much HTML being able
to whip up a bunch of pages quickly. There's nothing
beautiful about the results.
My advice if you want to
make beautiful pages is to read
one of the w3schools tutorials, which will take you
all of an hour, get a text editor with good syntax
highlighting and automatic indentation, and write the
pages by hand. Bonus points if your editor will
automatically insert the close tag together with the
open tag; this helps greatly in keeping your code
wellformed. Oh, and a graphic design course won't
hurt, too.
As far as inserting the Perl code, there are two ways
to go. You can use embperl, or you can make the whole
page a Perl script, sticking the HTML in strings or
HERE documents that the script prints.
The latter approach is the one I use.
update: Templates are on my list of
things I intend to evaluate; my recommendation should
not be taken as advice against using templates.
$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/