Something that didn't get mentioned is that CGI runs on the server side. What you're seeing in the HTML, above, is code that gets executed on the server the web page came from. It can't execute anywhere else.

If you want to run a server and create a database and let other people use it, then use CGI. But if you're trying to access someone else's information, forget about CGI.

Depending on what you want to do, LWP::Simple works fine for many simple and even some complex websites. Not everything requires an API.