The new Madison Island theme for Magento CE 1.9/EE 1.14 comes with several theme specific CSS files, madisonisland.css and madisonisland-ie8.css.
According to the Magento documentation (http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/ee114-ce19-rwd-dev-guide#remove-sample-content ) the way to do this would be via local.xml with the following code:
<layout version="0.1.0">
<default>
<reference name="head">
<action method="removeItem"><type>skin_css</type><name>css/madisonisland.css</name></action>
<action method="removeItem"><type>skin_css</type><name>css/madisonisland-ie8.css</name></action>
</reference>
</default>
</layout>
However, when testing this it does not remove the two CSS files as they both still load on the frontend (and yes of course the caches have been cleared). I assume that the reason they are not removed is because they are coded into head.phtml.
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<?php echo $this->getSkinUrl('css/madisonisland.css'); ?>" media="all" />
Instead of being loaded via: <?php echo $this->getCssJsHtml() ?>
Is that correct?
Of course they can be easily removed by copying head.phtml to custom_package/custom_theme/template/page/html/ and removing those lines from the template file itself but is this the best method or should there be an alternative XML way to do this?