hmm.. probably not what you want to hear, but here goes..

I don't actually understand why anyone would want to use the html generating tags in CGI.. never have, so I've never used it. 5 minutes with it this morning trying to solve a problem for another monk simply reminded me how uncomfortable I find it (they were already using it). I think I diagnosed the problem correctly and your post has just confirmed that for me.. You can't create the start of a table, then add the rows, then close off the table without doing it in one go.. that's just not right.. and definitely not modular.. all too hard for me.

templates, templates, templates.. that's the way to go as far as I'm concerned. Template::Toolkit Rocks! or maybe HTML::Template. Write your app to collect together all the data it needs to fill in the blanks in a template, then pass the data to the template module. In the template you can use whatever form of html you want and just insert variable tags, loops and things where you want the data put in.

Definitely worth the effort to get your head and app around this kinda thing.. IMHO..

cheers,

J