Loading a web page in a browser
Tony Gentilcore has just written a good post on How a web page loads and why blocking needs to take place when scripts and CSS load. I'm hoping that he's going to follow this up with a post on the SPDY protocol which looks pretty interesting for a faster web.
Google say that SPDY is an experiment with protocols for the web. Its goal is to reduce the latency of web pages.
At the time of writing this the third draft of the specification for SPDY could be found here.
One of the advantages that SPDY provides is that the resources needed by the page (JavaScript, images, CSS etc.) can be sent to the client in a compressed header and requested by the client before the client parses the HTML.
There's no indication if Google are going to push this specification yet because it's still experimental. One of the great advantages about owning an increasingly popular browser (Chrome) and a couple of popular web sites is that you can define the transport layer when your users are using your software end-to-end.