The official ALttP guide says on page 12: "Back in the mists of time, before the era of The Legend of Zelda and The Adventure of Link..." Dan Owsen stated in the November 25th column of ASK DAN that this statement was a mistake.
Here, somebody asks him about that, and Dan responds.
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Q: Hey Dan, You made a slight mistake on your most recent column (I'm actually surprised, considering you wrote the screen text for all the recent Zelda games). The proper chronological order of the Zelda series is as follows: Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Zelda: A Link to the Past (why do you think they called it "A Link to the Past"?) :), Zelda: Link's Awakening (both A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening feature the same Link), Zelda I, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (both Zelda I and Zelda II feature the same Link)

I don't disagree that the story is secondary to the adventure, but don't sweep it under the rug, either -- it's very important, and for me, a large part of why I like the Zelda series so much. Game play is important, but remember - this is supposed to be an escape from reality. There needs to be consistency between the different chapters of the story for this distant land to remain legitimate in our imaginations.

Anyway, A Link to the Past was created to tell the back story of the original Zelda games. In Japan the subtitle was "Triforce of the Gods," pertaining to the origins of the Triforce and the creation of Hyrule. (I realize you know all this already, but I figured I'd run through it for your readers in case you print it.) Ocarina of Time seems to dip even further back, to the actual time of the events that were spoken about in the past tense in the manual for SNES Zelda. (This was the same in the Japanese version, too.)

GB Zelda takes place shortly after SNES Zelda, where that very same Link goes out on a journey to further himself, yadda yadda yadda. He runs into a thunderstorm, he wakes up on Koholint... you know the story.

Anyway, hope this helps. And thanks for doing such a good job on the Zelda texts. I can't wait for OoT. :) ---John

A: A fatal misconception in trying to determine the order of the different Zelda games is relying on the titles of the games for clues. Having worked on these games and helping to come up with the English titles, I can tell you that you are reading too much into them. Just because the SNES game was subtitled "Link to the Past" doesn’t mean that the game took place in the past. It just means that there was some connection between the events in the game and the past. As for the tense of the text in the manual, I wouldn’t place any special significance on that—it is describing historical events which by definition occurred in the past. I do have to admit that calling the characters in Link to the Past "predecessors" of the original Link and Zelda might have been a mistake, perhaps an error in translation. By the way, I don’t mean to demean the story in the games—I do think it is important. However, I know the game developers never want to pin down specific relationships between the characters in the game because then their hands will be tied in future games. Even the hinted at relations in all the game are causing confusion!