title: Do external stylesheets get loaded before the HTML?
body: <p>If I have external stylesheets being included in the <code>&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;</code> section of my HTML page, will they be loaded before the HTML and immediately applied upon rendering? Let me present my specific use case.</p>
  
  <p>External styles.css file:</p>
  
  <pre><code>form label {
      display: none;
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Page containing form:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;head&gt;
      &lt;link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css" type="text/css" /&gt;
  &lt;/head&gt;
  &lt;form action="process.php" method="post"&gt;
      &lt;label for="name"&gt;Name&lt;/label&gt;
      &lt;input type="text" id="name" name="name" /&gt;
  &lt;/form&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Can I be confident that the labels will be invisible upon page load (no flickering due to CSS downloading)?</p>
  
  <p>Otherwise, I can add the style attribute inline, but that can be a maintenance nightmare.</p>