[whatwg] Proposal for change in recommendation for loading behavior of non-applicable stylesheets

[Andy Davies]

Doesn't this section of the HTML spec already allow for what Scott wants:

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-link-element

"For external resources that are represented in the DOM (for example,
style sheets), the DOM representation must be made available even if
the resource is not applied. To obtain the resource, the user agent
must run the following steps:

If the href attribute's value is the empty string, then abort these steps.

Resolve the URL given by the href attribute, relative to the element.

If the previous step fails, then abort these steps.

Fetch the resulting absolute URL.

User agents may opt to only try to obtain such resources when they are
needed, instead of pro-actively fetching all the external resources
that are not applied."

Looking at waterfalls for a page loading Android 2.3 and iOS 5, it
appears that iOS does defer the non-applicable stylesheets - question
is why don't more browsers?

iOS 5 - http://www.blaze.io/mobile/result/?testid=120615_J6_927
Android 2.3 - http://www.blaze.io/mobile/result/?testid=120615_2D_929

Cheers

Andy