Besides CGI, what would be some examples of approaches that are not "inline-perl approaches"?

Unless I misunderstood perrin, I think s/he may have just meant that not all templating approaches use Perl for their 'embedded' languages. Template::Toolkit, for example, has its own little language. (I couldn't tell, because I'm not familiar enough with Embperl, whether you're looking for a templating solution or something else, but the suggestion of Mason makes me think that at least what you want to do is within TT's bailiwick.)