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" -->.