[lmm]

> "Time to human satisfaction" should be a number that front-end developers measure and aim to improve. Just rendering the content server-side and showing it to the user first, then adding on the bells and whistles after that, is how you do that.

Not necessarily. If you "load" the page but it doesn't do what it should when I click on it, that can be much more frustrating to the human than taking a little longer to load but being fully functional when you do. The assumption that anything that isn't HTML is "bells and whistles" is pretty dubious (as is the converse assumption that everything in the HTML is valuable).

[Cyberdog]

If the purpose of your site is to show content to a human, then anything on the page that isn't the content the human wants to see is bells and whistles. I will die on this hill.

[lmm]

> If the purpose of your site is to show content to a human, then anything on the page that isn't the content the human wants to see is bells and whistles.

Sure, but a) the purpose is rarely just to show content, one of the great strengths of the web is interactivity. b) often a lot of what's in the HTML (and especially the CSS) isn't the content the human wants to see.