So, yeah, (X)HTML would be the route to go down...

As a personal suggestion, learn PHP. Perl is a thing of the devil.

Perl has a lot of cool stuff it can do, and it's really great when it comes to string manipulations, but reading it is like reading incoherent Greek.

In fact, there's an old practice amongst perl programmers to write a small program to obfuscate the phrase "I am a Perl Hacker" to the point where it is completely unreadable. These small programs (2 or 3 lines at most, perl programmers are of the old-school "I can write the entrire system in 1 line of code" mentality) would be included in signature files and would actually stand as your prowess with perl, your ability to make something that cannot be understood by any programmer alive (including yourself).