Sorry for the delay in replying. I've been a very busy WeeDom today!

The person who mentioned abstracting it off - yep,done that where possible.

Separating code/design being gospel, perhaps inappropriately - I agree. For internal webby tools it's not always worth the effort. But for a bigger web-project, particularly public-facing where design can become dated - always separate.

Indenting - I like indenting. Indenting is good, unless you're using a console-based editor where excessive indenting causes weird wrapping. But why would you? At the risk of getting flamed, there is always/almost-always a GUI alternative.

heredocs: hate 'em, hate 'em, hate 'em. Ugly things. But that's an opinion, not to be confused with a statement of fact.

My conclusion from all your comments (and thanks very much for participating in the discussion!) is that (apart from the buggy thing,and I've found the bugs and had to resort to quoted HTML to get around them) there's nothing wildly wrong with what I'm doing. My final justification is this - if you've absorbed the cost of compiling CGI.pm - why not use it? Why only use it for param() or Vars()?

Cheers,
WeeDom