Rules  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14 
Rule 5 - Put Stylesheets at the Top
 Examples  1  2  3  4 
Example 1 - CSS at the Bottom

Make sure to view this page in IE to see the blank white screen problem.

Current time: 11:59:56

In this example the stylesheet's LINK tag is included at the bottom of the document, right before the /BODY tag. This hurts the user experience. In IE this causes the page's rendering to be delayed when:

This causes the blank white screen problem. The page is totally blank until the stylesheet at the bottom is downloaded, on the order of 6-10 seconds for this page. The browser is waiting for the stylesheet to be loaded before it renders anything else in the page, even the static text.

Try Example 2 - CSS at the Top to see how these problems are avoided.

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