Slash (/) vs tilde slash (~/) in style sheet path

The second won't work because its not a recognised path by anything except asp.net code on the server side. And since your link tag is regular html and not a server control it never gets processed.

• / - Site root
• ~/ - Root directory of the application

The difference is that if you site is:

http://example.com

And you have an application myapp on:

http://example.com/mydir/myapp

/ will return the root of the site (http://example.com),

~/ will return the root of the application (http://example.com/mydir/).