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Current spec: "If the rel attribute is used, the element is restricted to the head element." http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/document-metadata.html#the-link-element In practice, developers do not follow above restriction and embed <link>'s in body, and all browsers support this behavior as well. Removing this constraint has multiple benefits: 1) It allows UA's to stop treating this as an error condition and instead use position of <link rel=stylesheet> in the document as an optimization hint to improve rendering performance - e.g. content above <link> should not block first paint, which is similar to how blocking scripts behave today. Some browsers already implement this behavior, and some sites rely on this behavior to improve painting performance; Baidu experience shows that this can deliver significant perf improvement. 2) <link rel=import> is already being used in the wild inside of <body> to import HTML and other content. 3) It makes the spec consistent with what's actually implemented and deployed in the wild (by UAs and site developers). whatwg thread with background discussion: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-perf/2014Oct/0115.html
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 27303 ***