Almost everyone agrees that anything fairly sizeable should use some kind of templating system. For small projects, there are three schools of thought:

1. Good ol' print statements
2. CGI.pm's HTML generation
3. Go right to a templating system regardless of the size

The print statement way is almost certainly the least maintainable, but maybe that won't be an issue for a small CGI. Using CGI.pm's HTML generation has a large following (not the least of which is merlyn). People of the other two schools often think that CGI.pm should only be about input processing and should ditch the HTML generation into a seperate module. However, there is probably too much code using the current system to change it now.

I personally favor going right to a templating system (unless its a really quick-and-dirty job). Its probably the most maintainable, but will almost certainly take longer to get it done the first time through (depending on the complexity of the templating system you use).

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated