Thanks -- I hadn't thought of just using ttree. I should also confess that I don't know whether I need compile-time or run-time templating, as I'm not totally clear on the difference... : )

In the short term, though, I've been obliged to front-burner a different project; but in a way that's OK because I realized that I'm not too clear on something pretty important: namely, the mechanism whereby a user's click tells the script what page to generate! In other words, I realized that if there are let's say 20,000 separate "chunks" of dynamic data sitting in a database, each of which can be slotted into the template to form one "page," I really don't know how to write the part of the script that takes a user's input selection and then generates that page and only that page. Pretty basic, huh? It's probably just a case of assigning each one a name, like 1.html, 2.html, etc., on up to 20000.html, and then creating my links accordingly. But what if the links themselves have to be created dynamically?

I'm sure I'll be putting some miles on the Super Search engine when it comes time to figure that one out...