Simple html vs Javascript generated html?

Stick with the traditional HTML. It's not only faster than doing everything with javascript, it's much more maintainable.

Unless there is a compelling reason otherwise, stick with the straight up HTML and use javascript for the more interactive pieces of your app.

Speed is a secondary concern to correctness - that is, serve the functional requirements first, then make it fast where necessary (some places, it might already be fast enough).

In this case, the decision to use static markup versus JavaScript is a question of who is consuming your document - is it only users with JavaScript enabled? If so, it doesn't matter too much. Do you need to take search engines into consideration? Disabled users? Thin clients that don't have full JS support, or paranoid users with JS disabled? In all of these latter cases, having semantic markup, not cluttered with superfluous elements, enhanced with JavaScript, is the only correct way to go.

The traditional approach is going to be faster because the browser only has to download, interpret and display. The approach you're suggesting would cause the browser to have to download, interpret, change * n times and then display.

That's as far as rendering goes.

As far as maintainability goes, you're creating a nightmare. That's the key to development. The number of nightmares in maintainability is proportional to the "quality" of the code, IMHO. Performance and optimization should come second to maintainability. (There are exceptions, of course. Nothing is black-and-white).

HTML was created to be an expressive language. Javascript wasn't. End of story, in my opinion.