Yes I expected there would be something to switch off xhtml. I tried - use CGI qw/:html4/; but maybe that has more to do with importing methods.

As a third point I forgot to mention a lot of the styling is rendered from css so that negates the use of attributes a bit too.

The real difficulty i am having now that i have extracted the data using the param methods is in relation to placing a textareas' value into a non textarea element such as a regular div and making it format to P or BR at the newline. I've tried mixing cgi methods with arrays and array scalars explicit and sometimes very explict. lol. And trying to regexp substitute P tags with existing carriage returns and newlines but I just cannot get that value to split and format from a predifined newline character(? i saw a ^M at one point if i can figure waht that is maybe im in with a shot). Maybe I have to tr/%daf/pack hex/ as i haven't done that yet.

my $ctp = CGI->new;

my $webmaster = "http\:\/\/www.mysite.com\/";

my @names= $ctp->param;

my @values;
 
 foreach my $name(@names){ 
          
  my $value = $ctp->param($name);
 
  push(@values, $value);

 }

# print "Content-type: text/plain\r\n\r\n";

 my @tone = $ctp->param('tone');
 #print $ctp->p(tone);     
 
my $doob;
#print $ctp->p("@tone");
print "\@tone: @tone\n\n";

if ($tone[0] =~ m/\\n/){ print "[^f]*. globals and carriage returns an
+d zero array value arrays !!\n\n"; }

foreach my $toneadd(@tone){
           if ($toneadd =~ m/\\r\\n/){ print "[^f]*. globals and carri
+age returns!!\n\n"; $toneadd =~ s/\\r\\n/<\/p><p>/;}
           $doob .= $toneadd;              
           print "\$toneadd: $toneadd\n\n"; 
   }
   
    my @tone = $ctp->param('tone');
                   
          foreach my $toneadd(@tone){
           $line .= "<p>$toneadd<\/p>";
          }
           print $line;

print "\$doob: $doob\n\n";

print "<p>$doob<\/p>\n\n";
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Which after another quick & useless debug sesh, I think is shifting me back round to the initial importing through a glob query. Though I can just go and re-open the file again and them in afterwards maybe a good enough workaround even if time consuming.

OR I gotta read some more stuff somewhere....

$ perldoc CGI |grep -i xhtml -C1

    -no_xhtml
        By default, CGI.pm versions 2.69 and higher emit XHTML
        (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/). The -no_xhtml pragma disables 
+this
        feature. Thanks to Michalis Kabrianis <kabrianis@hellug.gr> fo
+r this
--
        If start_html()'s -dtd parameter specifies an HTML 2.0, 3.2, 4
+.0 or
        4.01 DTD, XHTML will automatically be disabled without needing
+ to
        use this pragma.
--
    The -encoding argument can be used to specify the character set fo
+r
    XHTML. It defaults to iso-8859-1 if not specified.

--
    Otherwise it will be replaced by the default DTD. If the public DT
+D
    contains 'XHTML', CGI.pm will emit XML.

    The -declare_xml argument, when used in conjunction with XHTML, wi
+ll put
    a <?xml> declaration at the top of the HTML header. The sole purpo
+se of
--
        action: this script
        enctype: application/x-www-form-urlencoded for non-XHTML
                 multipart/form-data for XHTML, see multipart/form-dat
+a below.

--

        If XHTML is activated (the default), then forms will be
        automatically created using this type of encoding.
--
    The start_form() method uses the older form of encoding by default
    unless XHTML is requested. If you want to use the newer form of en
+coding
    by default, you can call start_multipart_form() instead of start_f
+orm().
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