I'm doing something similar to what you've described - mixing of static and dynamic contents on a page. I suspect it's a fairly common practice.

I'm not so certain about the merits of using 'includes' in your .shtml file. What I do know is that such a strategy would probably require the use of different scripts to produce the desired outputs. One disadvantage of this approach is having to maintain these little scripts.

Since you mentioned HTML::Template, which is what I'm using, why not have a template file that already has all the static contents (top and bottom) and make use of some display logic (tmpl_if, tmpl_else, tmpl_include, etc) to include the dynamic content? You need only to tweak one template file if any of the static contents needs to be modified. If you want to modify the dynamic content (include more things or exclude existing items), just tweak the script.

There might be other more efficient ways but using an 'intelligent' template that consists of part static and part dynamic content is one possible solution.

cheers,