Static resources allow you to upload content
that you can reference in a Visualforce page, including
archives (such as .zip and .jar files), images, stylesheets, JavaScript,
and other files.
Using a static resource is preferable to uploading a file to the
Documents tab because:
- You can package a collection of related files
into a directory hierarchy and upload that hierarchy as a .zip or
.jar archive.
- You can reference a static resource by name in page markup by
using the $Resource global
variable instead of hard coding document IDs.
A single static resource
can be up to 5
MB in size, and an organization can have up to 250 MB of static resources, total.