Fellow Monasterians

<disclaimer>This is more about a Perl module than Perl.</disclaimer>

I'm having problems getting <base href> to work in a particular H::T scenerio. I've tried a number of things, but I feel like I'm hunting gophers.

First, here's my file layout:

In root:
index.cgi
[cgi-bin] -> contact.pl
[pages]   -> contact.tmpl
          -> topnav.tmpl
          -> thankyou.tmpl
[download]

Now, here's the salient code

INDEX.CGI:
$template = HTML::Template->new(filename => 'pages/contact.tmpl');

CONTACT.TMPL:
<base href="http://132.321.33.321/" />
<tmpl_include name="pages/topnav.tmpl">
<form action="../cgi-bin/contact.pl"...>

TOPNAV.TMPL
...
<li><a href="?p=6">LINKS</a></li>
...
[download]

'Base href' works in the initial call of contact.tmpl from index.cgi. But if contact.tmpl is evoked from cgi-bin/contact.pl, e.g.,if errors are found in validation and I'm redisplaying the form with 'associate', H::T returns an error that it can't find my "includes".

So, I dropped the <base href> and went to relative paths. It worked fine until I called thankyou.tmpl from contact.pl after the form is processed. The navigation is messed up because it's trying to do cgi-bin/contact.pl?p=6.

I tried:

$template->param(HOME => $ENV{HOME});
$template->param(PATH => $ENV{PATH});
[download]

thinking that had something to do with it. But the "includes" error occurs in the

$template = HTML::Template->new(filename => '../pages/contact.tmpl');

Bottomline, is there a reason base href does not work when calling a .tmpl file from my cgi-bin/contact.pl? Or what path convention am I not getting? Thanks all!