This is one of the reasons I'm fond of Perl's Template::Declare. It's a declarative syntax for generating HTML that's still just plain Perl.

http://search.cpan.org/~sartak/Template-Declare-0.43/lib/Tem...

I certainly understand the use case of more-limited and embedded template languages, for working with designers or people less-comfortable with actual programming, or whatever, but when I'm just working on my own, or only with other programmers, Template::Declare works so much more nicely for me.