HTML was the original standard, not JS. HTML was evolving early on, but the web was much more standard than it was today.
Early-mid 1990s web was awesome. HTML served HTTP, and pages used header tags, text, hr, then some backgound color variation and images. CGI in a cgi-bin dir was used for server-side functionality, often written in Perl or C: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface
Back then, if you learned a little HTML, you could serve up audio, animated gifs, and links to files, or Apache could just list files in directories to browse like a fileserver without any search. People might get a friend to let them have access to their server and put content up in it or university, etc. You might be on a server where they had a cgi-bin script or two to email people or save/retrieve from a database, etc. There was also a mailto in addition to href for the a (anchor) tag for hyperlinks so you could just put you email address there.
Then a ton of new things were appearing. PhP on server-side. JavaScript came out but wasn’t used much except for a couple of party tricks. ColdFusion on server-side. Around the same time was VBScript which was nice but just for IE/Windows, but it was big. Perl then PhP were also big on server-side. If you installed Java you could use Applets which were neat little applications on the page. Java Web Server came out serverside and there were JSPs. Java Tomcat came out on server-side. ActionScript came out to basically replace VBScript but do it on serverside with ASPs. VBScript support went away.
During this whole time, JavaScript had just evolved into more party tricks and thing like form validation. It was fun, but it was PhP, ASP, JSP/Struts/etc. serverside in early 2000s, with Rails coming out and ColdFusion going away mostly. Facebook was PhP mid-2000s, and LAMP stack, etc. People breaking up images using tables, CSS coming out with slow adoption. It wasn’t until mid to later 2000s until JavaScript started being used for UI much, and Google’s fostering of it and development of v8 where it was taken more seriously because it was slow before then. And when it finally got big, there was an awful several years where it was framework after framework super-JavaScript ADHD which drove a lot of developers to leave web development, because of the move from server-side to client-side, along with NoSQL DBs, seemingly stupid things were happening like client-side credential storage, ignoring ACID for data, etc.
So- all that to say, it wasn’t until 2007-2011 before JS took off.