(A nod to thpfft for his reply: thanks for your points, it's good to hear about experience from like-minded people.)

I did actually have a long look at HTML::Template. I knew that its syntax does not inline Perl and it in general is simplistic; I had even written a few templates using it as I pointed out. The default syntax is just too bulky and not visible enough in a mess of surrounding HTML.

(This is in reply to thpfft as well:) As I kept saying - I was almost about to start on my own templating solution. I couldn't believe noone would ever have felt the same need as I for a powerful but minimalistic language. (See my initial post, ".. it's amazing ..") My look at HTML::Template wasn't enough to discover filters as a way of making it do what I want although I remember seeing passing mention of that in the docs.

I posted here out of desperation - I didn't want to start from scratch and knew I shouldn't, but I couldn't see any way of avoiding it. Thanks for the replies everyone, your help is greatly appreciated :) Another look at HTML::Template it is. Don't worry, I'm not going to pollute CPAN with yet another templating module anytime soon :) (Or any of my code in fact. ;) Though come to think of YATM would be a good name. Hehe.)

Sidenote: performance is not much of an issue in my case since the script is going to spit out static files. In effect it's a 'make' to be invoked via browser; I wish I could use WML, but alas, I don't even have a limited telnet login on the server, and I can't run it locally because I'm not the only one working on the site.