Question

I have an ASP.NET web application and I’m thinking about the following: before sending any HTML or CSS content to users, I wish to ‘compress’ them, then cache the result and send that to the clients.

I know it is possible to compress these by removing whitespaces, comments and stuff like that, but I’m not really familiar with more advanced solutions for this.

• Apart from this, what compression methods are there and what are the advantages of each of them?
• Does some browsers or the HTTP protocol itself support any kind of compression?

EDIT: I’m interested in doing this to dynamically-generated HTML, too.

Answer 1

gzip is most commonly used for “advanced” compression (i.e., not just removing whitespace). It is supported by all the major browsers: http://www.gzip.org/. It uses the DEFLATE algorithm. If you only want to minify your files, try:

• http://www.cssdrive.com/index.php/main/csscompressor/ for CSS
• http://fmarcia.info/jsmin/test.html for JS

Or try YUI Compressor or any of the other popular ones.