I too can think of a few reasons that one would not want to, or would not be able to use CPAN or it's relatives. First off, windows users don't always have the ability to build cpan's unix-centric modules. Also some users indicate that they are deploying an app or CGI on a shared server, where they do not have root. So In my recommendations I try to list either modules that currently ship with perl, or modules that are trivial to make, nmake, cpan,or ppm and that have limited depedencies.

HTML::TokeParser fits within these constraints, as It came with my Linux and Activestate perl Build.