Has Perl become some sort of old-schooler’s arcana? 
I’ve recently used Text::Template ( http://search.cpan.org/~mjd/Text-Template-1.45/lib/Text/Template.pm ) to great effect with the styles for a documentation site I’ve been working on. After writing a small driver program to mesh the template with the data, the result isn’t so different-looking than the examples here.
However, nothing beats direct browser support. Text::Template helped me a great deal while I tweaked my color scheme, but it was still lame that I had to run make after each change. Maybe I’ll wire Apache up to do it for me sometime…
Two attempts for adding a little horse power to CSS that didn’t end up flying:
- Netscape's JSSS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSSS )
- MSIE's Dynamic Properties ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537634.aspx )
There’s a point of view that states that it’s a good thing these technologies didn’t catch on. It’s probably true, especially where print applications are concerned. I assert, though, that it wouldn’t take a Turing-complete language to evaluate an expression like top: ((#outer@height - @height) / 2) - 150px, and I have written more pages than I care to remember that would have benefitted impressively from that kind of evaluation.
It would even still be somewhat friendly in situations where scripting is disabled or unavailable (unless non-geometry-related functionality crept in, but browser developers aren’t known for that sort of unscrupulous behavior, right?).