Revized edition:

Seems in my initial frustration with accomplishing such a simple task. I ultimately overcomplicated matters. :(
I think the following get's it right:
pageblocks.pm 

use strict;

package pageblocks;

sub xmlheader {
    qq(<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>\n);
}

sub xmldtd {
    qq(<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http:
+//www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; ch
+arset=utf-8" />\n);
}

1; # polygraph

[download]
and index.cgi 
#!/usr/bin/perl -wT

# index.cgi

print "content-type:text/html; charset=utf-8\n\n";
use strict;
use lib ('./');
use pageblocks;

print pageblocks::xmlheader();
print pageblocks::xmldtd();
print "<body>
 ...
</body></html>";

[download]

A big thanks to GrandFather, Jenda, and Anonymous Monk, for their thoughtful feedback.

--Chris

#!/usr/bin/perl -Tw
use Perl::Always or die;
my $perl_version = (5.12.5);
print $perl_version;

In reply to Re^3: Help with proper construction of callable scalars from a Module, please. by taint
in thread Help with proper construction of callable scalars from a Module, please. by taint

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