It seems I wasn't being quite so lucid with my original thought, so I'll post once more to say that it is not that I think LWP should replace CGI. I take full blame for making my post a little unclear on that point...

My point, in fact, is that most people will strive to make their code as compact and efficient as possible, so why is it such a crime to abhor bloating in modules? If I haven't made my arguments agains the bloat clear, I also haven't heard any decent reasons why it remains. So far the responses have gone along the lines of "it's not killing me, so who cares?" And there's nothing I revile more than apathy. I hope it's not the sound of M$ worshippers I'm hearing (who cares about the excesses, it's easy to use!). Now to see how many feathers that remark ruffles... ; )

Back to the topic at hand, however, I'll throw out this quote from a message brian d. foy posted on alt.perl about the "dangers" of CGI's namespace hogging:

(the function names) conflict with similar function names in other modules one is likely to use with CGI.pm, such as URI.

I won't pretend to be a perl guru, so my writing a new CGI module will have to wait a while. To show my ignorance, until I read that post I had been happily using CGI without a care in the world. I now find myself a little more wary about where and how I use the CGI module, and that's what prompted me to start this thread.

matt