Link type order

Does the order of link types matter? In HTML 4.01 section 6.12
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#h-6.12> says the following:

> Stylesheet
>  Refers to an external style sheet. See the section on external
>  style sheets for details. This is used together with the link type
>  "Alternate" for user-selectable alternate style sheets.

Which seems to imply that order doesn't matter. Yet when section
14.3.2 <http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/styles.html#h-14.3.2> talks
about alternate style sheets, it says this:

> To specify an alternate style sheet, set the rel attribute to
> "alternate stylesheet" and name the style sheet with the title
> attribute.

And every example I can find on in HTML 4.01 and w3.org follows this
order. Shouldn't "stylesheet alternate" be equal to "alternate
stylesheet"? I can't find a section in HTML that defines order to be
important or unimportant in link types, so I'm assuming it's
unimportant. Any sort of reference or insights would be helpful.

-- 
John