I think for a simple website, especially one with spartenweb or zero JS principles, a language with an architecture like PHP or ASP/ASPX fits well, where you just write HTML and server side code in the same file, and you navigate to that file from your URL to load it. For example, wwwroot/path/to/page.php on the server corresponds to https://example.com/path/to/page.php
Problem is, both PHP and ASP are pretty terrible languages, and ASP(X) has the additional dealbreaker of not being open source and only running on Windows servers, so I don’t really want to use any of them (I’ve tried all three), so are there any better web languages or web frameworks that does something similar?
Hiccup with Clojure works this way, and since Clojure uses s-expression syntax it’s natural to express HTML directly using native language data structures without any need for DSLs.
For small sites, you can run them on Babashka interpreter as seen here without needing the JVM.