Question

More a theoretical question.

We compress/minify css & js, but has anyone ever thought or tried to compress mark-up?

Q: Benefits (Pro/Contra) of mark-up compression, possible tools and scripts.

As it’s hard to have a solution for this Q, I’ll take the most detailed answer.

Thanks!

Answer 1

markup-compression is possible and widely used. there are a few possibilities (wich can be combined):

• compression using deflate or gzip if the clients browser accepts this (wich all modern browsers should do)
• minify markup to kick out all the tabs, linebreaks and multiple spaces as they aren’t displayed by the browser (note: this can lead to problems when using <pre> or white-space: pre;)
• leave out some markup (wich can be tricky and you really really shouldn’t do this, but google does. taking a look at the page-source you’ll see theres no closing body-tag for example. for a site like google, this makes sense, as leaving out </body> saves 7 bytes of traffic, wich is really a lot if you think of the daily page-views of google)