Odd. I cannot seem to get it to appear in the browser (though your example works fine). I looked through forum posts, and so far all I have found is someone else with the same problem: Static assets under domain root
and I have managed to get a different public file to display.
So I have two problems: (a) why can’t I display the file (using the public link) in my browser; and (b) is there an internal shortcut that could be used (which presumably represents the relative path from the css location to the asset)