Don't Use @import
Steve Souders, on his High Performance Web Sites blog, advocates the use of the link element over the @import directive for including CSS stylesheets.
In Chapter 5 of High Performance Web Sites, I briefly mention that @import has a negative impact on web page performance. I dug into this deeper for my talk at Web 2.0 Expo, creating several test pages and HTTP waterfall charts, all shown below. The bottomline is: use LINK instead of @import if you want stylesheets to download in parallel resulting in a faster page.
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