I've been working on this problem for a while and I can't solve it. In fact, I'm not sure there is a way around it except use alternatives to CGI.pm's HTML generating methods. The simplest form of the problem is as follows:

print $q->td(['one', '1', 'I']);
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The above line generates the following:

<TD>one</TD> <TD>1</TD> <TD>I</TD>
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The problem: how does one take one of those <TD> tags and turn it into the following?

<TD COLSPAN="2">...</TD>
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The following doesn't work:

$q->td([ 'two' ]),
$q->td({-colspan=>'2'},  [ '2' ]),
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That's because CGI insists upon treating each of these as a separate row, thus closing the <TR> tags around them. To solve this, we need to do all of it within a single td(...) call.

Cheers,
Ovid

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