I woke up this morning with a profound realization. “Why not put print stylesheets at the bottom of the page so they load last?”, I thought to myself. It makes perfect sense to any performance-conscious web developer who savors every last millisecond of performance gained. Your print styles aren’t needed until you print the page, so it is okay if it takes a little while longer to download.  Unfortunately the quirkiness of the browser makers trumps our otherwise sound logic.

According to tests done by Steve Souders, web performance guru extraordinaire, Internet Explorer blocks the rendering of content until all of the stylesheets have been downloaded regardless of their media type. And since Internet Explorer is the dominant browser by visitors to most mainstream sites, there is absolutely no benefit to including the print stylesheet at the bottom of the page.

A possible workaround would be to dynamically insert the print stylesheet (using JavaScript) into the web page after it has finished loading. This just feels icky to me as the poor sap who is most likely to print out the webpage I so meticulously coded is also the poor sap using Internet Explorer 5.5 with JavaScript turned off and BonziBUDDY turned on.