Looking back on my own experience, the first step is always "I'll write my own static HTML because why run a full service?" But then you want to put a list of pages or something in, so you need some kind of preprocessing. So you try to write a program to do that. But if you don't have something like XSLT, Rascal, or XTran in your toolbox, the straightforward path seems to be to have your own representation that's easy to parse in your general purpose language of choice and then emit HTML.