The main thing to worry about when downloading stylesheets is that IE won't render the page until all the stylesheets are downloaded.1 That's why I suggest that you put stylesheets at the top of your HTML document.
This holds true for stylesheets with media="print".
You might think that these wouldn't block rendering, but this test page shows that they do.
This page contains a stylesheet configured to take 4 seconds to download.
The stylesheet also has the media="print" attribute value.
If you load this test page in IE you'll see that rendering gets blocked for 4 seconds.
| 1 | Simple test pages may not reproduce this problem. My testing shows that you need a script (inline or external) above the stylesheet, or two or more stylesheets for rendering to be blocked. If your page has only one stylesheet and no SCRIPT tags, you might not experience this issue. |
