I prefer HTML templates over raw Perl, because I live in the hope that the code at one time will be "rock solid ^™" and won't be changed anymore, while I might want to change the look of the site more often, which is easily attained by using (one or more) templates.

Of course, once the code is done, I seldom go back and change the look and layout, but I've turned more and more to XML and XSL(T?) as a templating mechanism, a bit crude and resource intensive, but it delivers nice results fast (mostly on an intranet server for 6-10 people not generating many hits, and regenerating the documentation is done by saxon offline anyway).

Offtopic question of the minute : Does anyone know how to read data from arbitrary files using XML/ECMAScript ? Like, read the width and height from a .jpg file ?