I think the fundamental answer you're looking for is... no.
You can't use PHP in a non-PHP 'page', or 'document', e.g. blah.html, in the way that you can write JS in a non-JS document, e.g. blah.html.
This is the difference between a 'script' language (JS) and a 'text-processing' language (PHP, ASP, and the others), so to speak.