When you don't tell us what "simply 'doesn't work'" means of course we have no idea what that means. If I said "I went out to my car today and it doesn't work!" and didn't give you any information on past issues, known problems, or anything you would have a hard time telling me why it doesn't work since it could be anything at all. ;) Until you figure this out, use a print statement to generate the HTML. Use the HTML generated by CGI as your base and modify it to be closer to your working example until you find the part of the HTML that is causing the error. That is what debugging normaly requires, slow methodical changes until you find that one change that makes the program start/stop working correctly. At that point you'll know what false assumption or mistake you or the computer made and hopefully know how to fix it, or someone else will.