in reply to cgi or mod_perl

You don't have to make a choice if you are just creating simple web pages. The secret is to write all your web pages as modules and then you can call them from either mod_perl or a cgi-bin. 
# here is the web page.
package WebPageOne;

sub new
{
    bless {}, shifth;
}

sub html
{
print <<EOP;
<head>
<body>
This is a web page.
</body>
</head>
}
1;

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And the cgi-bin 
#!/usr/bin/perl
# webpageone.cgi

use WebPageOne;

print "content-type: text/html\n\n";

my $x = WebPageOne->new()

print $x->html;

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And the mod_perl handler. 
package ModPerlPageOne;

use Apache2::Const -compile => qw(OK);

sub handler
{
    my $r = shift;
    my $x = WebPageOne->new();

    $r->send_http_header('text/html');
    
    $r->print $x->html;

    return OK;
}

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Of course these examples are missing most of the extra stuff you get from CGI and Apache, but normally all that is needed is CGI->param() and that can be hand rolled. Or you can pass in an instance of Apache::CGI or CGI to WebPageOne and use it for your CGI needs.
-- gam3
A picture is worth a thousand words, but takes 200K.

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom