Best practice for handling assets (images/css etc)

Dear CI community!

Our assets folder is at the same level as the application and system folder.

So, we have created a rule in .htaccess to handle URIs starting with /assets

Is there a best practice to handling assets within the CI framework?

If we want to continue to keep assets outside CI, but don't want to do .htaccess based routing, is there a way to set up routes in CI for this scenario.

Thanks in advance
Krish