Though I may agree about the ugliness of CGI's html generating subroutines, please have your facts straight. You can too start the table, add the content, then close it. I'll just take that as a misunderstanding on your part ;)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI qw/:standard *table/;

print header(),
 start_html('foo bar qux'),
  start_table();

print Tr(
 td('foo'), td('bar'), td('qux')
);

print end_table(),
 end_html();
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