While I find coding HTML with CGI.pm cumbersome, I can think of a couple reasons why you might want to use it.

Most scripts just gather input, validate and process one form.

By utilizing CGI.pm, you can bring error handling and presentation up a notch.

I recently wrote a simple module that inherets from CGI that allows me to register informational error messages for any missing/bad parameters with "error bullets" that are automatically displayed next to any form element registered with CGI.pm. (Also keeps track of colspans from the previous row so I don't hard code it. Makes maintainence easier.)

All screens functions can do "double duty" (form/error respones) so usually you can have a one to one match between screens and functions.

This would be a big pain to do without CGI or something else to handle HTML generation.

I think an approach like this works very well as interfaces get bigger.

I wrote a 10,000 line product/order management CGI interface for a fairly big (now defunct) dot com mixing and matching perl and html because CGI.pm's syntax was too cumbersome for me (I was too lazy).

While I hacked it out in a couple days, enhancements where a huge headache.

Below is a pretty trivial example but it doesn't take much longer to code it this way than to do it the down and dirty way and I think it is much cleaner. Everything is in one nice spot. The following example is at http://smb.yso.net/cgi-bin/silly.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
# silly.pl
# http://smb.yso.net/cgi-bin/silly.pl


use CGI::ParamError qw(:standard :html3);

my $q = new CGI::ParamError;

# REQUIRED FIELDS
# first_name last_name email


print header();

unless (param()){
    display_form();
}else{


    
    unless (param('first_name')=~/\w/){
        param_error('first_name',"Sorry, I need to know your first nam
+e");
    }

    unless (param('last_name')=~/\w/){
        param_error('last_name',"Sorry, I need to know your last name"
+);
    }

    unless (param('email')=~/^\w+\@\w+\.\w/){
        param_error('email',"Sorry, param('email') doesn't seem like a
+ valid email");
    }

    if ($q->has_errors){
        display_form();
    }else{
        # DO SOMETHING HERE
        confirmation();
    }



}


#########################################
sub display_form{


    # show_error_messages() is part of my module, this is where the ve
+rbose messages are displayed
    # Should be called AFTER fields are validated.

    print start_html(-title=>'Silly Script'),
        show_error_message(),
        start_form,
            "First Name",textfield(-name=>'first_name'),br,
            "Last Name",textfield(-name=>'last_name'),br,
            "Your Email",textfield(-name=>'email'),br,
            submit,br,
        end_form,
    end_html;

        

}

#########################################
sub confirmation{

    print start_html(-title=>'Silly Script'),
        "Thanks for stopping by ",param('first_name')," ",param('last_
+name'),"!";
    end_html;

        

}
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