Flash of Unstyled Content

[mmcirvin]

The great Dave Hyatt explains why, in Safari, you sometimes see a page momentarily render without style information.

Comments

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure why Hyatt rejects the idea that execution of stylesheets should not be similar to execution of client-side scripting. Almost any style behavior that can be expressed in CSS can also be expressed in Javascript--sometimes much more torturously, sometimes more elegantly. So why NOT treat styles as a set-based, declarative variant of scripting?

Furthermore, the presence of a style reference is an explicit hint to the renderer that some of the default rendering behaviors are inapplicable; any further rendering work undertaken until the styles are retrieved and interpreted is likely to be wasted effort.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think he wants the gain in page loading speed that you get when you can start parsing before the styles are all loaded.

I think I'm more with Rone; I prefer the FOUC to just stalling the page. But in my own experience, if your users and your boss say it's a problem, then it's a problem whether you think it is or not.