does it matter at all what order the or
or
tags are in in the
Optimization
According to the folks over at Yahoo! you should put CSS at the top and scripts at the bottom because scripts block parallel downloads. But that is mostly a matter of optimization and is not critical for the page actually working. Joeri Sebrechts pointed out that Cuzillion is a great way to test this and see the speed improvement for yourself.
Multiple Stylesheets
If you are linking multiple stylesheets, the order they are linked may affect how your pages are styled depending on the specificity of your selectors. In other words, if you have two stylesheets that define the same selector in two different ways, the latter will take precedence. For example:
Stylesheet 1:
h1 { color: #f00; }
Stylesheet 2:
h1 { color: #00f; }
In this example, h1
elements will have the color #00f
because it was defined last with the same specificity:
Multiple Scripts
If you are using multiple scripts, the order they are used may be important if one of the scripts depends on something in another script. In this case, if the scripts are linked in the wrong order, some of your scripts may throw errors or not work as expected. This, however, is highly dependent on what scripts you are using.
meta does not matter, but link (for css) and script matters.
script will block most browser from rendering the page until the scripts are loaded. Therefore, if possible put them not in the head, but the body.
css link will not block page rendering.
It would only matter if one of the linked files (CSS/Javascript) depended on another. In that case, all dependencies must be loaded first.
Say, for example, you are loading a jQuery plugin, you'd then need to first load jQuery itself. Same when you have a CSS file with some rules extending other rules.
As already pointed out meta describing content charset should be the first otherwise it could actually be a security hole in a certain situation. (sorry i dont remember that situation well enought to describe here but it was demostrated to me at web security training course)
Nope, it doesn't matter, except for CSS linking or inclusion, because of CSS inheritance and the fact that it overwrite what was already styled (sorry for my english, i think my sentence is not really clear :-/).
Not a daft question at all.
CSS above Script tags for reasons already mentioned.
CSS is applied in the order you place the tags - the more specific the stylesheet, the lower down the order it should be.
Same goes for scripts - scripts that use functions declared in other files should be loaded after the dependency is loaded.