I'll bite. I think CGI takes on a bit too much as well. I love it's form handling, but it continues on way beyond the CGI. I'll keep using it for a couple of reasons though, the primary?

I don't know enough to confidently evaluate the alternatives:

• CGI::Minimal
• CGI::Base
• CGI::BasePlus
• CGI::Lite

This is just a partial list of the CGI namespace that deals with it. Some of them don't seem to be actively maintained (rather important). Is one of them a stripped down/refactored CGI.pm? How much testing have they gone through? CGI.pm is part of the standard distribution, should another become the de facto standard?

If Mr. Stein were willing maybe a group could help him factor the code out into some subclasses and have CGI.pm inherrit from them (for backwards compatibilty). This (to my rather unknowledgable view) would seem the best of both worlds. It would stay a standard while those wanting a lighter weight solution could use a base class. From what I understand thousands of development hours in writing and lots of testing went into CGI.pm. Even thinking of throwing that away seems criminal.

Update: Perhaps that "Even thinking of..." was a bit too much hyperbole. What I really meant was just abandonning the code base instead of exploring the possibility of refactoring is criminal. I agree completely that it is way too much bloat especially in a "typical" CGI environment (w/o mod_perl or the like).