I played with mason for a bit, are you allowing mason to cache the templates? if you are, you'll need to restart apache each time you change them ... (sadly the option's name escapes me)

Why not just move the whole link off into another component?

<& /bits/link, action => remove, card => $cardid &>
[download]

Then you can mess about whith the widget without having to worry about how complicated or ugly the markup is because you're including another component. Then you can even change it into a form POST later on.

Update: added & and >'s to make valid HTML::Mason