If you are hell-bent on providing Ajax-style functionality, I found the following approach much more convenient and better degrading:

1. Develop the site as plain HTML+CGI
2. Write JavaScript to manipulate the DOM of your templates and add the wanted hooks dynamically.

That way your HTML stays relatively minimal and the added functionality gets pulled in when your JavaScript code adds the necessary attributes. You should avoid document.write and use the real DOM methods though ;)