Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason

Preface

Mason is a tool for embedding the Perl programming language into text, in order to create text dynamically, most often in HTML. But Mason does not simply stop at HTML. It can just as easily create XML, WML, POD, configuration files, or the complete works of Shakespeare.

Mason was originally written by Jonathan Swartz, with the help of the rest of the CMP development team at CMP Media in 1996, and in its earliest incarnations it was known as Scribe.

Mason was first made publicly available as Version 0.1 in August of 1998. Since that time, Jonathan Swartz has invited your humble authors to participate in the further development of Mason. Mason has been expanded, and rewritten and is much changed from those early days. This book covers Version 1.12 of Mason.

Intended Audience

This book assumes that the reader is familiar with Perl at an intermediate level and that common Perl idioms don’t stop you in your tracks. While you need not have written your own modules previously, familiarity with Perl’s object-oriented syntax will be helpful.

Since Mason is most often used in the generation of web sites, this book frequently presents its example in terms of generating HTML pages. You definitely do not need to be an HTML expert to read this book, but a passing familiarity with HTML will be helpful in understanding what the output is intended to look like.

As previously mentioned, Mason is well-suited for the generation of any sort of dynamic text, including markup languages such as XML, ...