[Bug 16879] New: Allow style and link elements beyond the head

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=16879

           Summary: Allow style and link elements beyond the head
           Product: HTML WG
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: minor
          Priority: P2
         Component: HTML5 spec (editor: Ian Hickson)
        AssignedTo: ian@hixie.ch
        ReportedBy: jmdragonwake@gmail.com
         QAContact: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org
                CC: mike@w3.org, public-html-wg-issue-tracking@w3.org,
                    public-html@w3.org


This is a suggestion regarding the content model as it pertains to the style
and link elements.  I suggest that they be permitted wherever phrasing content
is expected, similar to the script element, in order to apply to the document
(or, in the "scoped" case, to the siblings) retroactively.  Most browsers
support this already, and I believe it would be very useful for developers of
high-performance web applications.

I'm a former Facebook engineer, and during my time at Facebook we put a lot of
emphasis on fast apparent load times.  In order to accomplish this, we would
inject most of our script tags at the end of the body element rather than in
the head element.  That way, the static content of the page could be made
visible quickly, before kilobytes or megabytes of JavaScript had to be
downloaded.

With the advent of CSS3, animation and even some interactivity can be
implemented outside of JavaScript, but the CSS syntax can be quite verbose,
especially when many of the experimental features need to be included multiple
times with various browser-specific prefixes.  This would suggest that, for
large style sheets that mainly define animations or other non-static styling
rules, developers could benefit from including the style or link elements at
the end of the document instead of in the head, to be applied only after the
static content is visible.  Currently, HTML5 semantic rules do not allow for
this, though major browsers all currently permit it.  Relaxing the restriction
on where style and link elements can appear could solve this problem.

An alternative:

If you find the notion of ad hoc style and link tags peppering HTML5 documents
offensive, perhaps it would be preferable for HTML5 to permit an optional
"foot" element to appear after the body element within a document.  The foot
element would expect metadata content just like the head element, allowing for
CSS and JavaScript to be loaded after the body content is already visible.

While browsers do not currently recognize a foot element, most already treat
unrecognized tags as transparent elements, and they already treat elements
after the body tag as children of the body, so metadata content included within
a foot tag will already be handled properly.

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Received on Saturday, 28 April 2012 03:30:21 UTC