Consider this from the point of view of the Perl novice. Here's an example of an HTML table from the CGI documentation:

print table({-border=>undef},
              caption('When Should You Eat Your Vegetables?'),
              Tr({-align=>CENTER,-valign=>TOP},
              [
                 th(['Vegetable', 'Breakfast','Lunch','Dinner']),
                 td(['Tomatoes' , 'no', 'yes', 'yes']),
                 td(['Broccoli' , 'no', 'no',  'yes']),
                 td(['Onions'   , 'yes','yes', 'yes'])
              ]
              )
           );
[download]

Not so bad as it stands, as long as you understand array references and hash references. But what if you don't? Early in my Perl career I gave up in frustration in the middle of some nested tables and just cut-and-pasted some existing HTML code. And it worked.

I wouldn't do that today (in fact, I would probably now use a module such as HTML::Table or Data::Table for most HTML tables), and I have since revised most of my older code. But I'll admit that there were times when I used plain HTML to just get the job done. Not because I thought it was superior, but because I was still learning. And there's nothing wrong with that. (I hope.)

buckaduck