APEX

I'm back with another question about optimizing the Apex page payload, specifically the payload that's brought along with the #HEAD# substitution in the page template.

First, right now Apex doesn't allow us to change or remove the #HEAD# substitution from the header region of the page template. If you try to remove the string Apex will complain that it needs to be between the head tags of the header region of the template. IMHO this should not be enforced with this particular mechanism. Especially because we don't have any control over what's being delivered with the substitution.

Next, if you examine what's delivered by the substitution you'll find that it's a mix of CSS and javascript files. And of course that makes sense if you plan on using all the standard Apex stuff and you don't care about what loads when.

However, if you're trying to optimize your page payload/performance it would be really nice to be able to control the content of that substitution. For starters it would be nice if the CSS and javascript payloads were broken out into two different substitutions. Then you could load CSS at the top of the page and load javascript at the bottom of the page, as is suggested by several page optimization tools.

So my suggestions, if anyone out there is reading, are thus:
1) remove the validation that requires the #HEAD# tag in the header of the page template - so we can remove it entirely if we want to
2) split the #HEAD# substitution into two separate parts, one for CSS and one for javascript, so we can more finely control the placement of these payloads in the page

What I'm attempting to do is combine all my CSS into a single minified file (again, as the page optimization tools suggest) and with the way things are today it seems like it's not possible to do this without incurring the penalty of loading the same CSS twice. Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions about this topic?

Earl

P.S. I know you can control the loading of the standard javacript/CSS at the page level, but that's a bit tedious to do when you could just allow the #HEAD# string to be optional in the template header rather than required.