This reminds me somewhat of Petal,
Actually not really, what the OP wants is much closer to my own HTML::Seamstress. Petal embeds a mini-language within HTML... Seamstress is pure Perl and pure HTML and nothing else.

Seamstress takes its inspiration from XMLC and I am very grateful to lachoy for mentioning it. Petal takes its inspiration from TAL.

To understand the difference between push-style templating (Seamstress) and pull-style templating (tt/mason/petal/html::template, etc) you should read Terence Parr's paper on the subject.

I have beheld the tarball of 22.1 on ftp.gnu.org with my own eyes. How can you say that there is no God in the Church of Emacs? -- David Kastrup 
[tag://html,templating]

[download]
Enforce strict model-view separation in template engines via HTML::Seamstress The car is in the cdr, not the cdr in the car

In reply to Petal is pull-style... like TT/mason - Seamstress is push-style by metaperl
in thread RFC - Template::Empty by redhotpenguin

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