func sez :
I would appreciate your comments/criticism on the script.
sub page_body {
    # The body area and closing tag

    print <<XHTMLBODY;
    <body>

    </body>
</html>
}

[download]
this doesn't even compile, but that's probably a bad copy & paste problem -- you forgot the end XHTMLBODY.
Once that's fixed, we get the following output : 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
        chartset=iso-8859-1" />

        <meta name="author" content="mynamehere" />
        <meta name="copyright" content="mynamehere" />

        <meta name="keywords" content="" />
        <meta name="description" content="" />

        <title>PUT-YOUR-TITLE-HERE</title>
    </head>
    <body>

    </body>
</html>

[download]
Not bad. It's valid XHTML, and it doesn't look too bad. You've accomplished what you set out to do.

However, through the use of CGI, this code can be compacted : 
 
use CGI::Fast qw(start_html endhtml);
print start_html(-title=>'PUT-YOUR-TITLE-HERE',
    -enctype=>'iso-8859-1',
    -meta=>{
        'author'=>'my name here',
        'copyright'=>'my name here',
        'keywords' => '',
        'description' =>''
    },
    ), end_html  ;

[download]
which outputs 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html
        PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML Basic 1.0//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/xhtml-basic10.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-US"><head><title>P
+UT-YOUR-TI
TLE-HERE</title>
<meta name="description" content="" />
<meta name="author" content="my name here" />
<meta name="keywords" content="" />
<meta name="copyright" content="my name here" />
</head><body http-equiv="text/html" enctype="iso-8859-1"></body></html
+>

[download]
Pretty similar (the encoding in the xml header differs and the DTD is XHTML Basic, not Strict, and CGI adds the http-equiv and enctype to the body tag.). If this isn't too big a difference, you could cut down your code to far fewer lines. If you're concerned about readability, substitue CGI::Pretty for CGI::Fast. (Wouldn't a CGI::Fast::Pretty be nice?)

In reply to the finest hand rolled XHTML known to man vs. evil factory produced XHTML (boo) by boo_radley
in thread Making a 'blank' xhtml page - request for comments by func

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