If you're taking an existing set of pure HTML pages and adding dynamic portions to them, you'll want to look into using a templating system. Whether you want to just add dynamic parts, or to go whole hog like perlmonks (every page on this site is built out of dynamically generated chunks). The first approach, you build up a web page out of a single large template, filling in the dynamic parts. With the second, you'd build each piece (using small templates for the pieces, perhaps) and put them all together.

A *really* nice aspect of this approach is that it gives you a better separation between designing the look and writing the program to stuff the information into the containers (this is called "separating content and program logic"). Neither of these will entirely obviate CGI.pm, mind you.

Perl modules that come to mind (and there is a Tutorial on this site for the first one) : HTML::Template and the Template Toolkit. There are others, but take a look at these and see if either fits your needs.

perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp ($n = <STDIN>); 
+$rose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$oth
+er_name\n"'
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