Here is a brute force approach (multiple regexs):

#! perl -w
use Data::Dumper;
open(TMPL, "<my.template") or die $!;
my $tmpl = 0;
my $last;
my %hash;

for (<TMPL>) {
    next if /^#/;

    if (m!<template>!) {
        $tmpl = 1;
        next;
    } elsif (m!</template>!) {
        if (%hash) {
            $Data::Dumper::Sortkeys = 1;
            print "Result: ", Dumper(\%hash);
        } else {
            print "Bad template: $tmpl\n";
        }
    } elsif ($tmpl) {
        if(/^\s+(\w+)\s*=\s*$/) {
            $hash{$1} = '';
            $last = $1;
        } elsif(/^\s+(\w+)\s*=\s*(\S+)\s*$/) {
            if ($2 or $2 == 0) {
                $hash{$1} = $2;
            }
        }
        elsif (/^\s*(\S+[^=])\s*$/) {
            $hash{$last} = $1;
        }
    }
}
   close TMPL;
[download]

Not too elegant but it is fairly clear and works. Needs more code to handle all edge cases though.