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Answer 1

If you need your SVGs to be fully styleable with CSS they have to be inline in the DOM. This can be achieved through SVG injection, which uses Javascript to replace a HTML element (usually an element) with the contents of an SVG file after the page has loaded.

Here is a minimal example using SVGInject:

After the image is loaded the onload="SVGInject(this) will trigger the injection and the element will be replaced by the contents of the file provided in the src attribute. This works with all browsers that support SVG.

Disclaimer: I am the co-author of SVGInject