Probably not silly. If you didn't want to use a (known) browser to view HTML, then you might need your own browser, which can be written with Perl in various ways, from one-liner to a full-blown code. And if this is what you want, you've come the right place. Unfortunately, while you seem to know what you mean, most (if not all) people don't. So I think it's probably a bit silly. What was your question again?

Oh you said to display HTML code? You mean raw HTML tags? I would do what Grundle suggests. And LWP::Simple::getprint() would give you similiar result.

Now, having said that, I've probably broken some of brian's Guide to Answering Questions :-)