That's what I thought... I saw a post somewhere where someone claimed to have inserted <%perl> inside the function part of the jQuery script, but I couldn't see how a client-side function could cause any back-end processing, but I figured I'd ask anyway.
Thanks for the advice. It'll probably be easier to support with static HTML pages anyway. If management decides to add a bunch of extra functionality later (which I guess is very likely), having Perl scripts generate all those pages would be messy anyway, let alone trying to incorporate jQuery as well.