Each one is not hand-coded and tuned, because it just doesn't matter. If you want to take the time in your favorite editor, and hand-type each and every HTML tag, and make sure it's perfectly optimized, then you clearly have more time than I do.

In my experience, I can hand-code HTML far easier than I can deal with an "editor." The HTML will come out clean and nicely indented, allowing much more efficient changes and extensions later. It might be different if I were tasked with 300 plain HTML files with no code, no functionality.

However, I think you may have missed my point. I am addressing the "people who don't want to or shouldn't have to learn the intricacies of HTML." This may be acceptable for something simple, like HTML creation. But, do you really want people using "automatic" Perl code generators on your servers? Those people who don't want to learn the intricacies of Perl are the very people who should be forced to do so, or ask for professional assistance.

Concerning the "extra colspan," I am referring to HTML that is a few K when hand-coded, but 40-50K from some editor. They tend to put gratuitous font tags around every element, create nested tables for no reason, duplicate style information and colors repeatedly and redundantly, over and over. This mess is far from maintainable, except in another editor, where the junk may be compounded even further.

On a 10Mbps network, 50K files will download quickly. Are we willing to inflict that kind of wastefulness on an unsuspecting world (who likely do not have OC3 connections to the internet)? How long do you like to wait while Netscrape renders a pile of highly inefficient HTML? Bad HTML is a more serious problem than simple download times.

Russ
Brainbench 'Most Valuable Professional' for Perl