I don’t think there is anything wrong with user agents downloading resources (like images and stylesheets) linked to by an html document. It is the providers, not the user agents, who have violated the trust of users by including unnecessary scripts, fonts, spyware, advertisements, etc.
"I don't think there is anything wrong with user agents downloading resources (like images and stylesheets) linked to by an html document."
Neither do I. For some websites, this is both necessary and appropriate.
However, in cases where the user does not want/need these resources, or where she does not trust the provider, I do not think there is anything wrong with not downloading images, stylesheets, unnecessary scripts, fonts, spyware, advertisements, etc.
Could it have anything to do with the browser he is using?
Does it automatically load resources specified by someone other than the user, without any user input?
Above I specified www.nytimes.com. I did not specify any other sources. I got what I wanted: text/html. It came from the domain I specified. (I can use a client that does not do redirects.)
But what if I used a popular web browser to download the front page?
What would I get then? Maybe I would get more than just text, more than 206K and perhaps more from sources I did not specify.
If the user wants application/json instead of text/html, NYTimes has feeds for each section:
where $1 is the section name, e.g., "world".The user can use the json to create the html page she wants, client-side. Or she can let a browser javascript engine use it to construct the page that someone else wants, probably constructing it in a way that benefits advertisers.