cgi perl script

Your question and your code don't have anything to do with Perl.  That is html code and the parts you're referring to are html comment tags.

Hello,

Allow me to clarify further.

The above code is from a .txt file in a templates directory.

The '<!--error-->' tag produces actual errors, as mentioned in my previous post, it's not a comment tag.

Here is an instance of the '<!--error-->' tag in the main perl script.

open ( IN, "$template_path$page") or die $!;
				while ( <IN> )		{
					s/<!--Error-->/$message/;
					s/<!--MESSAGE-->/$message/;
					print $_;
				}
			close IN;

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and also

s/<!--ERROR-->/ $message/ if $message;

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and also

while ( <IN> )		{
				s/<!--Error-->/$message/;
				s/"><!--UN-->/$user_name">/ if $user_name;
				s/"><!--PW-->/$password">/ if $password;
				print $_;
			}

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Here are some instances of '<!--NAME-->' and '<!--NAMER-->' that show up in the the main perl file, together with other sign up form tags.

while ( <IN> )		{
				next if /<!--NAME-->/ and $specs[0] eq 'no';
				next if /<!--AGE-->/ and $specs[1] eq 'no';
				next if /<!--GENDER-->/ and $specs[2] eq 'no';
				next if /<!--COUNTRY-->/ and $specs[3] eq 'no';
				next if /<!--CITY-->/ and $specs[4] eq 'no';
				next if /<!--NEWS-->/ and $specs[5] eq 'no';
				s/<!--NAMER-->/*/ if $specs[0] eq 'mandatory';
				s/<!--AGER-->/*/ if $specs[1] eq 'mandatory';
				s/<!--GENDERR-->/*/ if $specs[2] eq 'mandatory';
				s/<!--COUNTRYR-->/*/ if $specs[3] eq 'mandatory';
				s/<!--CITYR-->/*/ if $specs[4] eq 'mandatory';
				s/<!--NEWSR-->/*/ if $specs[5] eq 'mandatory';
				print $_;
			}

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My question remains, whether it's alright, to remove tags similar to '<!--NAME-->', from the txt file, since they don't seem to be doing anything at all.