> Particularly in the early days of the Internet, it was considered critically important that the page be renderable before the document has been fully loaded. In other words, we want to be able to render the beginning of the HTML to the page before the HTML which will form the bottom of the page has been fully downloaded.
It's ironic that nowadays lots of sites completely ignore this guideline and force you to wait several seconds for webfonts/CSS/JS to load before the page is readable at all. We have much faster download speeds now, but this hasn't always translated into proportionately faster perceptual speeds.
It's a shame if this is the reason DSSSL was rejected, because DSSSL looks more elegant than CSS other than this issue.
This is partly a problem with the design trends. There have been an aversion to have a “Flash Of Unstyled Content / Text” (FOUC / FOUT) in designs, especially since the time when image replacements went out of time and dynamic solutions like sIFR and similar techniques to style headers emerged. Now we have the same with web fonts, we prevent display until the right font I loaded. It’s very bad for UX.
It's ironic that nowadays lots of sites completely ignore this guideline and force you to wait several seconds for webfonts/CSS/JS to load before the page is readable at all. We have much faster download speeds now, but this hasn't always translated into proportionately faster perceptual speeds.
It's a shame if this is the reason DSSSL was rejected, because DSSSL looks more elegant than CSS other than this issue.