Good tool to minimize HTML footprint?

Question

Does anyone know a good tool that can be run on a page (for asp.net, for example) to help to minimize the footprint size of the page?

The page will have typical items: HTML, Javascript, etc.

I've heard of Javascript crunchers in the past, that will make the size of the code as compact as possible (and obfuscate it, I suppose).

The goal is to help optimize the page size (make it as small as possible for speed, without changing anything).

Is this possible?

Answer 1

Well, its not a automatic cleaner-upper, but I like YSlow for optimizing pages. And the YUI Compressor can minify your javascript.

If you're really interested in javascript, the keyword is "minify".

Also, look at this question just posted: HTML and stuff

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

You could configure your web server to compress the page on the fly (and possibly cache the compressed version) for any client that indicates it can take a gzip or zip (or other) encoding, which is pretty much all of them.

Answer 3

Yep, definitely. I am not an asp.net guy, but things you could look for (as others have said):

• gzip compression for the page - a server option
• js: like you said, there are minifying options for javascript, which in turn can be gzipped as well.
• css: there are minifying options just like javascript, and can also be gzipped.

Our java apps use pack:tag. Maybe you could find a similar .net replacement.

Yslow, already mentioned, can show what improvements you can make.

Answer 4

Search for some ASP .NET Compression techniques, if you're on IIS6 I recommend you MbCompression, however if you're running IIS 7 it has great built-in HTTP compression support, you can define which files get compressed based on their MIME type in your configuration files.

Answer 5

A bit of fundamentals: IIS saves compressed response of JS/CSS/Html files on disk so, subsequent requests for JS/CSS is served from Disk(bypassing step of compression). While compressed response for ASPX/ASCX are not cached on disk, since response varies from request to request.

Therefore, Best practise is to keep Javascript/CSS in their own files and avoid putting inline CSS/Script in aspx/ascx.

Broadly there are two ways to reduce Page-Size/HTML 1) Compression by webserver/HTTPModule [Enable IIS 6 HTTP Compression][1]

2) Obfuscation/compression by third party tool - JASOB is my favourite one.

It can also compress/obfuscate javascript/css code from your php/asp.net/perl/jsp/XSLT file. And If like vanila DOS then there's command line interface too.

I have used it in several ASP.NET projects, I just select my webproject directory and JASOB provides nice option to publish obfuscated version of webproject directory. This means it obfuscates javascript/css from all files lying under your webproject directory and yeah it traverses sub directories too. And All of this in one click.

Hope it helps, Maulik Modi http://www.jasob.com/Features.html

[1]: - http://msmvps.com/blogs/omar/archive/2006/08/10/iis-6-compression-quickest-and-effective-way-to-do-it-for-asp-net-compression.aspx

Answer 6

I personally would not sacrifice readability and maintainability for size.

Dynamic web server compression saved me a TON (given text compresses so well), and further optimization would have gained me very little.