[kazinator]

Making it a dollar sign would cause countless bugs for people who generate HTML using templating languages whose variables are indicated by dollar sign. From time to time, someone would add target="$blank" to a templates, forgetting that the $ must be escaped to be literal.

They might have to resort to predefining a reserved variable called blank, whose value is "$blank". :)

Similar reasoning applies to most other special characters.

Given how HTML gets generated by preprocessors which use special characters in this manner or that, its best not to come up with new schemes within HTML itself involving special characters.

Carving out a reserved space within an existing namespace is safe.

[robocat]

Your reason is unlikely to be a cause.

The _ comes from the W3C in 1995 well before JavaScript was commonly used for templating HTML.

Scripting has used $ for variables for a long time: I think the most relevant history line for $variable is PHP comes from Perl comes from shell scripts. I also remember finding $ ugly on Vax.

There were a huge variety of templating syntaxes for server side and HTML generation was virtually all server side in the 1900s.

Server side languages were very rarely JavaScript before Node in 2009.

JavaScript wasn't used much for HTML generation before Ajax. There were soon after many many client side templating syntaxes.

I'm guessing only Brendan Eich could say why $ was accepted for JavaScript variable names.

Timelines are hard because the foundations were compressed within a decade: JavaScript 1995, PHP 1996, DHTML 1997, Ajax early 2000s, jQuery 2006.

Syntaxes tend to be extremely path dependent, and every developer cribs from everything they use.

[kazinator]

Shell script here documents can generate HTML:

  cat <<!
  <div>
    ...
    <a href="$url" target="_blank" ...
  ...
  !

A form of CGI existed as far back as 1993 on the NCSA web server.