Since the YSlow recommendations and practices are almost universally used, wouldn't it be possible to automate the process? Could someone write a servlet filter that incorporated the optimization rules and automatically applied them to outgoing content on the fly? And you could make this an Apache module so that it could sit at the web server layer instead of at the container layer.
This would also address issues that arise when you're using a product or framework that assembles the page dynamically, and you're not in control of how the css links are constructed.
Yes -- this is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for! A nice batch process that takes care of everything when I publish my static content. Shouldn't be too hard to make something like that, my problem is finding the right tools (pngcrush, JS minifier, JPEG EXIF stripper etc) and the proper settings to use for each and every one of them. It's a jungle.
This would also address issues that arise when you're using a product or framework that assembles the page dynamically, and you're not in control of how the css links are constructed.