To call this kludgy is being kind ;) You should explain exactly what it is you want to do, I suspect you want to download posters from this site? Have you considered examining how other software gets it's movie posters? Have you searched https://metacpan.org to see if an API already exists? My previous reply also asked you to ensure the JavaScript did indeed do what you assumed, is this the case?

From my limited understanding, yes the page is constructed by javascript more than html.

And the other points I raised?

Yes, this is possible, but sounds like a very roundabout way of going at it.

See the target="_blank" attribute for links and (I guess) HTML forms.

See WWW::Mechanize::Chrome for a module by me which allows web scraping and running of Javascript. It needs Google Chrome or Chromium installed though.

Forgive my being rep repetitive, but I wanted to make sure: My Perl script is on one machine and the browser (in this case Chrome) would be on another machine. So wanted to make sure it works that way. Or does the Perl script have to be local Chrome machine??

It would be helpful perhaps to monitor network traffic via firefox's developer tools (other browsers have similar i guess). you may be lucky that eventually the convoluted javascript-based, ajax-based webpage leads you to an image url which is straightforward to reconstruct.

Ideally, your scraping script should be as autonomous as possible, so you can be at the beach when it scrapes from a datacenter dungeon - scripts like this kind of hell. Improving your skills to this end, I would personally consider it Life's purpose.

Sounds like you want to download the content of web pages. Have you tried wget? It does exactly that.

But to answer your original question (how do I open new tabs in the web browser?), you could insert the following code into the output HTML:

<A HREF="javascript:OpenMyWindows();">Open My Windows</A>

<SCRIPT>

MyURLS = [
"https://www.perlmonks.com",
"https://www.foxnews.com",
"https://duckduckgo.com",
"https://www.yahoo.com"
];

function OpenMyWindows()
{
  while (MyURLS.length)
    window.open(MyURLS.shift());
}
</SCRIPT>
[download]

^ This will create a link, and when you click that link, several new tab will be created. BUT your web browser will block them, because they are popups. So, you have to click on Allow popups from your site.

You could create a popup or new tab as soon as the browser loads the page without having to click anywhere, but the browser will again block your popup:

<SCRIPT> window.open("https://www.yahoo.com"); </SCRIPT>
[download]