I've used HTML::Template a little, mainly in the Secret Santa project I did
this past Christmas for my wife's family. One thing I disliked was using the
normal syntax: <TMPL_VAR NAME=IMAGE_SRC> -- it made looking at it
difficult (it wasn't always easy to tell what was an HTML tag, what was
plain text, and what was HTML::Template stuff), and it made it impossible to
validate my pages before they had data.
Fortunately, there's an alternate syntax: wrap the syntax in HTML comments:
<!-- TMPL_VAR NAME=IMAGE_SRC --> does the job. It uses more
characters, true, but it gets highlighted different than HTML tags, as well,
and that's worth a lot.
And why do I have to say "NAME=" every time? That gets annoying. As it turns
out, I can simply say: <!-- TMPL_VAR IMAGE_SRC -->, and that, too will
get the job done.
Finally, what about those times when I want to define a template, but have
it broken into parts, too? Basically, I want HTML::Template to behave a
little like SSI. No worries; there's a TMPL_INCLUDE tag that can do this:
<!-- TMPL_INCLUDE NAME="filename.tmpl" -->.
