HTTP Header Stylesheets

Question

According to this: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/styles.html#h-14.6 I can link stylesheets directly in the http header. In php it would look like this:

header('Link: <http://www.acme.com/corporate.css>; REL=stylesheet');

are there any drawbacks in doing this?

Answer 1

The main drawback is that it only works in Firefox and Opera. See http://greenbytes.de/tech/tc/httplink/.

Answer 2

are there any drawbacks in doing this?

Debugging styling issues gets a little harder I guess. You can't directly see from the html source of a page what external styles get included.