link element onload

This is kind of a hack, but if you can edit the CSS, you could add a special style (with no visible effect) that you can listen for using the technique in this post: http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/478985.aspx

You would need an element in the page that has a class or an id that the CSS will affect. When your code detects that its style has changed, the CSS has been loaded.

A hack, as I said :)

Today, all modern browsers support the onload event on link tags. So I would guard hacks, such as creating an img element and setting the onerror:

if !('onload' in document.createElement('link')) {
  imgTag = document.createElement(img);
  imgTag.onerror = function() {};
  imgTag.src = ...;
} 

This should provide a workaround for FF-8 and earlier and old Safari & Chrome versions.

minor update:

As Michael pointed out, there are some browser exceptions for which we always want to apply the hack. In Coffeescript:

isSafari5: ->
  !!navigator.userAgent.match(' Safari/') &&
      !navigator.userAgent.match(' Chrom') &&
      !!navigator.userAgent.match(' Version/5.')

# Webkit: 535.23 and above supports onload on link tags.
isWebkitNoOnloadSupport: ->
  [supportedMajor, supportedMinor] = [535, 23]
  if (match = navigator.userAgent.match(/\ AppleWebKit\/(\d+)\.(\d+)/))
    match.shift()
    [major, minor] = [+match[0], +match[1]]
    major < supportedMajor || major == supportedMajor && minor < supportedMinor