Developing an application for most operating systems is made easier because you have some kind of intermediation layer between the program and the interface. These are commonly things like MFC, TK, QT, and the like, which can distance your program from the nuts and bolts of making buttons and menu items work. As far as I can tell there's no established equivalent for developing Web-based applications that use HTML.

It seems that no matter how much you try to isolate HTML from Perl, using templates, for example, there are always occasions where it's just not worth the effort. It starts with a quick fix, but then one thing leads to another and you might have entire blocks of code, here documents, string constants, and worse. Certainly, this could be avoided, but at what cost? Application performance? Missed deadlines?

I've dabbled with various bits and pieces, now and then, like CGI.pm and it's HTML generator functions, but none have really been satisfactory. They always seem to break down at some point, leaving you empty handed, having to work around something by doing it yourself. As much as I like abstraction, it only works if it does the whole job and not just most of it.

I'm sure this is a problem many Web developers face, so I'm really wondering what others do in a similar situation.

In reply to Meditations On HTML In Perl by tadman

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