I'm suggesting the hybrid approach here, exemplified by the Rendr and React.
Give the full html of the first page, load the JS necessary. You get the best of both worlds.
On the first request, the client receives a rendered html page, gets to read the page, then JS functionality is attached.
On any subsequent pages, you do a simple JSON request and update the DOM.
The approaches come together without sacrificing anything. You get to write a single code base using JS (with a node.js backend doing string manipulation so it doesn't even need a DOM), the user gets a page without having to wait for external resource loads, and all page transitions past that are a simple data-fetch away.
Comments
I'm suggesting the hybrid approach here, exemplified by the Rendr and React.
Give the full html of the first page, load the JS necessary. You get the best of both worlds.
On the first request, the client receives a rendered html page, gets to read the page, then JS functionality is attached.
On any subsequent pages, you do a simple JSON request and update the DOM.
The approaches come together without sacrificing anything. You get to write a single code base using JS (with a node.js backend doing string manipulation so it doesn't even need a DOM), the user gets a page without having to wait for external resource loads, and all page transitions past that are a simple data-fetch away.