<acronym title="Flash of Unstyled Content">FOUC</acronym> – Watch your Mouth!
I was wondering why some sites were adding empty in their (Amongst those, bBlog’s templates I’m working on at the moment)… Nosy person that I am, I quickly stumbled upon BlueRobot which explains what FOUC is (Flash of Unstyled Content, no connection whatsoever with Janet Jackson). You probably have noticed it before without really paying attention to it: the page appears without any style applied and then the style goes into action (For the herd of French-speaking readers that might be willing to know more about FOUC in their mother tongue, go there).
According to BlueRobots, this occurs with IE when the @import rule is used to import styles – even though I’m pretty sure I experienced it while using Mozilla on that very same site, which uses two style sheets: the first one (default one) is applied and the pages look white and then my styles are applied and it all becomes normal.
That solution to that problem is fairly simple, though I’m not quite sure I understand why it works: add a
<SCRIPT> or <style> afterwards. And here is my mysterious empty tag entering the scene! Unknown solution to an unknown problem, woaw, it’s been a heck of a day!¶
