The link to the script would then control what happens and the "fellow who is in charge of the site design" would be able to alter it.

hmm that would be fairly trivial to do, the only issue I have with it (other than an unusual method for the webmaster to set the columns in a table) is that it would make links to the gallery somewhat tricky, especially if someone were for example to link to it from the site's forum. I guess we could have a gateway page for people to link to. Or I could just set a default # of columns in the script.

Just Another Perl Alchemist

but this (heretical) "webmonkey" (hmm, is that vaguely deprecatory?) can't resist observing that - - IMO, ymmv - -

Much of the current rage for separating content and structure is another case of a (relatively new) advance in our thinking about "TBW ("The BEST way," © 1984 - 2007 by ww) to do something being carried to a counterproductive extreme.

As McLuhan tells us, "the medium is the message;" ww's corollary holds that "presentation is an essential quality of the medium, and hence, part of the message."

...or, :-}), you may chose to simply view this as yet another rant.

For the most part I agree, however, I don't think the perl guts to the system are relavent to the medium or the message, and more importantly, The web side of things is to be maintained by someone else other than me, someone who, at best, knows of perl, so it'd be bad for him to need to dig into my code to alter a presentation element, I was hoping someone might have some ingenius idea of a way to allow the webmaster (that better than monkey for yah? :P ) to edit the template just as though it were any other page.

I wonder if perhaps another templating system would lead to my solution, I just went with the only one I could find that I could get on my home box that'd run w/ activeperl, so I could test before I messed around with something live.

Just Another Perl Alchemist

I think that that 'someone' will have to learn the basics of your templating engine, if she is to maintain the web site without your further involvement as a web service programmer. If she is to be in control of things, then I suggest that you develop an API-like system: for every template define bunch of variables of the system, that the designer can work with. You write the docs about the meaning of each variable and present them to the designer. She is then able to change the presentation as she likes.
I am in somewhat similar position; I am the web design maintainer and the programmer on the server side (I got finished design of our site). And I did just what I described: so if I want to change something I don't have to browse through server-side source, my template already 'knows' a lot.
Also, if you plan some serious programming stuff on the template side, I suggest you try Template::Toolkit as HTML::Template is somewhat limited to simple expressions.

CSS

.image {
    float: right;
}
img {
    width: 200px;
    height: 200px;
}
[download]

<div class="image"><img src='foo.jpg'></div>
[download]

Hmm, this just might work, with a little tweaking, maybe some padding, I may well get the effect I wanted. I guess this is a case of me looking for to specific an answer, instead of a solution to a general problem, and also looking on the wrong side for the solution.

Of course, this goes to show just one of the many things I love about this community, and stayed here so long (I tend to wonder from most places after a couple months). Even though the eventual solution was... off-topic, I suppose, it was offered without the usual sort of shouting that so many other places see. Also goes to show why I'm not in charge of the HTML side of things, my html and CSS are rather rusty.

Just Another Perl Alchemist

This is by far the most elegant solution. I, too, have written a gallery that uses H::T, and it used a config setting that specified how many images per row. But that was because I always used tables for layout, and I was never happy with the solution. Now I simply use divs which float to take up the available display space - and gone is the pain of setting up the H::T dimensions as array references of hash references

use CGI::Ex::Template;
my @a = qw(one two three four five six seven eight);

my $temp = q{
    [%~ cols = 3 %]
    [%~ rows = a.size DIV cols %]
    [%~ IF a.size % cols ; rows = rows + 1 ; END -%]

    <table>
    [%- FOR i IN [1 .. rows] %]
      <tr>
      [%- FOR j IN [1 .. cols] %]
        [%~ k = (i - 1) * cols + (j - 1) %]
        <td>[% a.$k %]</td>
      [%- END %]
      </tr>
    [%- END %]
    </table>
};


CGI::Ex::Template->new->process(\$temp, {a => \@a}) || die $CGI::Ex::T
+emplate::error;
[download]

    <table>
      <tr>
        <td>one</td>
        <td>two</td>
        <td>three</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>four</td>
        <td>five</td>
        <td>six</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>seven</td>
        <td>eight</td>
        <td></td>
      </tr>
    </table>
[download]