An early alternative would've been to use an integrated language for both HTML and JS features, like Curl, published in 1997:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curl_(programming_language)
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1504/IJWET.2003.003259
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/curl/wwwpaper.html
(Disclosure: I worked at the Curl commercial spinoff.)
Or, many Lisp people just used s-expression data for HTML, and Lisp for everything else. Here's a typical way I did, in 2000, in Scheme:
https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/html-writing/
And a less-common later take on it, which used syntax extension rather than data:
https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/html-template/
I actually pitched some Web ideas to Tim Berners-Lee around 2000, including Scheme for Web programming. But shortly after that, he promoted using Python for some Web stuff, because, IIRC, Python was inclusive, making Web programming accessible to more people. Which was understandable, and one of the ways many techies thought about the Internet, before there were career tracks, when the Internet was something we knew about and wanted to bring to the world. (In hindsight, I wish I'd then tried to write a very inclusive practical intro book/tutorial for Scheme at that early point, but I was preoccupied with other things.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curl_(programming_language)
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1504/IJWET.2003.003259
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/curl/wwwpaper.html
(Disclosure: I worked at the Curl commercial spinoff.)
Or, many Lisp people just used s-expression data for HTML, and Lisp for everything else. Here's a typical way I did, in 2000, in Scheme:
https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/html-writing/
And a less-common later take on it, which used syntax extension rather than data:
https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/html-template/
I actually pitched some Web ideas to Tim Berners-Lee around 2000, including Scheme for Web programming. But shortly after that, he promoted using Python for some Web stuff, because, IIRC, Python was inclusive, making Web programming accessible to more people. Which was understandable, and one of the ways many techies thought about the Internet, before there were career tracks, when the Internet was something we knew about and wanted to bring to the world. (In hindsight, I wish I'd then tried to write a very inclusive practical intro book/tutorial for Scheme at that early point, but I was preoccupied with other things.)