The rest of the requests were triggered by the browser, not the programmer, because they were part of the initial HTML and the browser follows the HTML spec. The person complaining about it and is technical and knows this, they were under no misconception that they were viewing a document format that doesn't include code execution. Of which I'm having trouble of even thinking of an example, because even Word documents can execute code by default.

If you dislike HTML, then don't use it. Use another format that serves your text-only needs. Gopher is a possibility, just don't click on any HTML files if you're using a web browser though.