6 - Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

5 - Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

4 - Your first appearance, he said to me, is the gauge by which you will be measured; try to manage that you may go beyond yourself in after times, but beware of ever doing less.

3 - Your first appearance, he said to me, is the gauge by which you will be measured; try to manage that you may go beyond yourself in after times, but beware of ever doing less.

2 - @1 ... I haven't moved it to a theme mostly because I haven't gotten that far in my xpages discovery :)

.. as for the order, I agree if you think of the xpage/component as a hierarchy, and assume that's what ultimately determines what CSS markup gets applied where in the browser, but it's not ... you can order the XML of the xpage in (about) any order in the code ... like my sample above, the header custom control comes before the resource definition ... the processing of everything I would think should be linear as it parses the source ... CSS is so dependent upon the order of appearance (in the page) to determine the proper markup to apply to the elements. Othwerwise the compiler is making a guess as to what I as the develop has intended, and has a great chance of getting it wrong.

1 - Why not move the common css to a theme, there they will load before any defined in an xpage or custom control.

And if you think about it, the way your currently doing it and the way it's outputting the css is correct. First is the css defined in the actual xpage and then the css defined in any custom controls in the order the cc appears in the xpage.