The problem is that you are expecting HTML::Form to fetch the page and then parse it but this is not what it does.

You will need to fetch the HTML yourself using LWP or similar, get it into a string and then give that string to HTML::Form::Parse(). The confusion is caused by the presence of the BaseURI parameter, but this is only used for resolving relative url's within the form. Try something like this.

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;
use URI;
use HTML::Form;


#folder where the file resides
my $base = URI->new("http://web.umr.edu/~msw/CS304/");

my $file = get('http://web.umr.edu/~msw/CS304/personal-info.HTML');

#try to parse the file, it only has 1 form
my $form = HTML::Form->parse($file, $base) || die("Parse failed");

print Dumper $form;
[download]

Ps. Nice XHTML:)