How to Enhance Your Perl Web Applications with HTML and CSS

Introduction

Perl has long been a favoured scripting language for web development, offering powerful text processing capabilities and a vast collection of modules that make it easy to perform a wide range of tasks. While Perl handles the backend logic of web applications, HTML and CSS are indispensable for designing the frontend, providing the structure and style of web pages. This article guides you through integrating HTML and CSS into your Perl web applications to create dynamic, visually appealing web content.

Setting the Stage with Perl

Perl’s CGI (Common Gateway Interface) module is a popular way to generate web content dynamically. CGI scripts can process user input from web forms, interact with databases, and dynamically generate HTML content based on server-side data. Here’s a simple Perl CGI script to get us started:

use CGI;
my $query = CGI->new;

print $query->header('text/html');
print $query->start_html('My Web Page');
print $query->h1('Hello, world!');
print $query->end_html;

This script generates a basic HTML page with a header. The CGI module's methods like header, start_html, h1, and end_html help in generating the corresponding HTML tags.

Integrating HTML