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Just thinking about it, XHTML1.1 spec and by extension, HTML5 (assumed)... well Markup is designed so that unless otherwise specified, "order" isn't supposed to matter.
Everything in the Body tag obviously is ordered a specific way for the browsers rendering engine to interpret, but the HEAD and BODY tags themselves conceptually have nothing to do with render order (despite their name, and except includes in HEAD; if an include depends on another include obviously that must be loaded in first), and thus follow the same rules as any Markup language.
Throwing the HEAD tag block below the BODY tag block works (at least in WebKit based browsers anyways) but all I've been able to do so far is test that te Title tag works as it should. Not a totally conducive test, but as I write this on my phone, I didn't have time to go any further with my thought process.
I'm wondering how doing this would affect SEO, and worse yet: loading of Script and CSS files typically handled in the HEAD. I understand a practice lately has external loading of script files happening at or near the bottom of the markup to ahem delay their loading for when the page is ready, would this react any differently?
Basically I'm asking, What are the *repercussions * of having a website where the HEAD block is located below the BODY block?
<html>
<body>
Test
</body>
<head>
<title>Test</title>
<script src="test.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="test.css" />
</head>
</html>
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It would only have a negative effect on SEO, if any at all.
First off, your proposal results in incorrect HTML. The HTML4.01 DTD, which strictly defines the structure of HTML documents mandates that <head> becomes before <body>:
<!ENTITY % html.content "HEAD, BODY">
(If the order didn't matter, then it would be <!ENTITY % html.content "(HEAD|BODY)+">
Secondly, I'd wager most spiders look for a <head> element as quickly as possible, if it can't find one before the <body> element then it will probably discount your document at best, if not completely ignore it. I suspect most spiders would ignore any <head> elements encountered after <body>.
Third, it ruins the user experience. Sometimes pages can take a while to load, but a browser parses the HTML as it downloads. As soon as it sees <title> it displays it to the user so the user knows the page has at least partially loaded (even if it hasn't been rendered yet). Without this ability your users might close the browser tab/window out of frustration if it loads too slow, as they'd think the site was completely unresponsive.
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