Include In Head adaptive Tag and Webcenter Default CSS questions

Question

Hello I'm fairly new to Webcenter
I`m currently working on a project that`s requiring us to do a lot of customizing of Templates and Stylesheets changes, I have a couple of questions I was hoping someone might be able to help me with.
1) I want to inject some code into the page header of all webcenter pages. I understand that there is an adaptive tag "includeinhead", documented here:
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13174_01/alui/devdoc/docs60/Portlets/Adaptive_Portlets/Using_Adaptive_Tags/plumtreedevdoc_integration_portlets_adaptive_namespacetoken.htm
This works, for the most part. However, for IE I would like to include the 'ie shim' which fixes behaviours for IE (adding things like border radius), etc...this code goes as follows:
<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script src="//html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
<![endif]-->
As you can see, there are 'comment' tags that are not really comments, but directives to IE to process the script. This unfortunately gets parsed out by webcenter because (I assume) it just sees the whole block as a comment...So I am wondering what can be done about this.
2) I am wondering where the 'default' stylesheet that webcenter uses resides. By default, I am referring to the styles that get applied in the cases where tags are not defined in the skin file. I am having some difficulties around this because often Webcenter injects inline CSS into the controls where I don't really want it to... For example, in the "panel header" control, webcenter injects code for the title field and automatically sets the width of the cell. I would like to override this and control it completely.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Is that really a big deal or is it ok .... ? I'm always thinking .... oh god how heavy that is , anytime you call up the page the browser has to go through all that first ... is it actually ok or are there any tricks or tips ?
It's always a good idea to worry about how heavy the LINKED files are since they contribute to the overall weight of the page.  The contribution of the links themselves, though, is negligable.  There is also benefit in managing the order in which those links appear.  Put CSS links first and follow them with javascript links (since the CSS will affect the page rendering, while the javascript most likely will not), so the browser can begin to render the page even while it's waiting for the js files to be fetched.
2 - Templates are great but If a spry is only needed on some pages,how do we handle that ? By setting up another template ? Or is there a better way ?
If you are applying Spry effects to a Template child page, DW is smart enough to drop those links into the editable region in the head of the page (which is what it should do).  Just make sure that the editable region falls BETWEEN your CSS links and your JS links to allow you to arrange things as mentioned above.  There is never a real need to have more than one Template per site.
3 - is it better to have 1 single compressed css file with ALL styles in it or various css files ?
There is a small performance hit everytime you have to go back to the server for another file.  So two pages of the same overall weight, one with 1 externally linked file, and the other with 10 externally linked files will show a difference in their download time.  How significant that difference is will depend on many variables, but it will be a real difference.  That being the case, it's always better to opt for a single file than multiple files.  Practically speaking, the difference will usually be small, especially when you consider how small these 'incremental' css files usually are....