in reply to Running a cgi script from index .html

If your webserver supports it, yes. Apache has Server Side Includes (SSI), which allow you to have html comments that the server replaces with real content, by doing something like this:

<!--#exec script="myscript.cgi" -->

But this really isn't a perl question, so if you aren't using Apache, or this doesn't help, you should really ask in a forum related to your web server software.