>>The difference only important with LEFT OUTER JOIN because conditions in ON clause are evaluated before joining tables and WHERE conditions are evaluated after. It can produce different results.
>
>Only LEFT outer join? Not RIGHT?

I never had a reason to use RIGHT OUTER JOIN but it may be affected too.

>Is there a document explaining the general order in which SQL SELECT clauses are processed? I understand that the optimizer makes many decisions but there should be some sceleton to the command.

Unfortunately, no. Trail and error.