After this post and Siegfried’s article, I just might make some

Thanks for sharing Robert. I hate black boxes, and that was one of them.

As mentioned above, certain web browsers and other plugins offer the end user to switch stylesheets.

It isn’t ever seen by the user, which is why they do make sense on an anchor tag.

Great! Now, how can I trick you into writing in English instead?

Good to see that your reaction is akin to mine.

Siegfried,

Yes, first and foremost it would be a nice way to offer the option to the end user, but most don’t know about this feature.

Secondly, I think it’s a nice way to test custom skins on the same HTML code, possible mobile version etc. So yeah, it’s good learning.

I think, alternate stylesheets where basically meant as an accessibility feature. So anyone having difficulties reading a page might choose another stylesheet better suited for his needs. But of course it is possible to add them just for fun, too. Or to experiment with new styles before relaunching a site. F.ex. you might develop the new style as alternate style, then, when everything works, exchange the preferred and the alternate style, and voilá you have relaunched your site without any outtage. And anyone preferring your previous style may choose to use that alternately. Over time you might add a plethora of different styles.

What i have experienced: If you want to add alternate styles, and especially if those alternate styles are very different (f.ex. different geometry), then your HTML has to be 100% free of presentational markup. So building a site with at least 2 very different styles is the perfect way to learn semantic markup

Very different behavior than what I would expect.

But then, I had not heard of a “preferred” stylesheet until I read your post. Thanks for the explanation.

As mentioned by other commenters, it’s to be able to offer the end user, through certain web browsers and/or plugins, to be able to switch stylesheets. To be honest, though, it was overkill in my case and removing the title atribute was the way to go.

Siegfrid,

Yes, it does have some logic as well as an element of being unexpected.

Dave,

Didn’t actually know it was native in Opera.

Tommy,

Yes, I have experienced it now.
Thanks for the explanation!

A style sheet with rel="stylesheet" and no title is a persistent style sheet. It will always apply for the specified media types.

A style sheet with rel="stylesheet" and a title is a preferred style sheet. It will apply unless the user chooses an alternative style sheet.

A style sheet with rel="alternate stylesheet" is an alternative style sheet and will only apply if the user chooses it.

Preferred and alternative style sheets are grouped with the title attribute. When the user chooses one group all style sheets with that title are enabled and all the others are disabled (except the persistent ones, of course).

Since only one group can be preferred, it’s not a good idea to have multiple style sheets with rel="stylesheet" and different titles. But you already found that out, didn’t you?

I have some of these alternate stylesheets on my web site. Just for fun, nothing important. And indeed here it is essential that those stylesheets are ignored until the user specifically selects one of them. But i always thought this behaviour was limited to rel=”alternate stylesheet”.

Well, sure, if you offer alternate stylesheets, you should also preset the preferred, or default, stylesheet. This stylesheet then has to have a name to make it selectable by the user. The user may choose to select one of the alternate styles, then later might choose to get back to the default stylesheet. So it has to be selectable by the title. So it may be a somewhat strange and unexpected behaviour, but it hase some logic.