{"rowid": 155, "title": "Minification: A Christmas Diet", "contents": "The festive season is generally more about gorging ourselves than staying thin but we\u2019re going to change all that with a quick introduction to minification.\n\nPerformance has been a hot topic this last year. We\u2019re building more complex sites and applications but at the same time trying to make then load faster and behave more responsively. What is a discerning web developer to do?\n\nMinification is the process of make something smaller, in the case of web site performance we\u2019re talking about reducing the size of files we send to the browser. The primary front-end components of any website are HTML, CSS, Javascript and a sprinkling of images. Let\u2019s find some tools to trim the fat and speed up our sites.\n\nFor those that want to play along at home you can download the various utilities for Mac or Windows. You\u2019ll want to be familiar with running apps on the command line too.\n\nHTMLTidy\n\nHTMLTidy optimises and strips white space from HTML documents. It also has a pretty good go at correcting any invalid markup while it\u2019s at it.\n\ntidy -m page.html\n\nCSSTidy\n\nCSSTidy takes your CSS file, optimises individual rules (for instance transforming padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; to padding: 10px 0;) and strips unneeded white space.\n\ncsstidy style.css style-min.css\n\nJSMin\n\nJSMin takes your javascript and makes it more compact. With more and more websites using javascript to power (progressive) enhancements this can be a real bandwidth hog. Look out for pre-minified versions of libraries and frameworks too.\n\njsmin <script.js >script-min.js\n\nRemember to run JSLint before you run JSMin to catch some common problems.\n\nOptiPNG\n\nImages can be a real bandwidth hog and making all of them smaller with OptiPNG should speed up your site.\n\noptipng image.png\n\nAll of these tools have an often bewildering array of options and generally good documentation included as part of the package. A little experimentation will get you even more bang for your buck.\n\nFor larger projects you likely won\u2019t want to be manually minifying all your files. The best approach here is to integrate these tools into your build process and have your live website come out the other side smaller than it went in.\n\nYou can also do things on the server to speed things up; GZIP compression for instance or compilation of resources to reduce the number of HTTP requests. If you\u2019re interested in performance a good starting point is the Exceptional Performance section on the Yahoo Developer Network and remember to install the YSlow Firebug extension while you\u2019re at it.", "year": "2007", "author": "Gareth Rushgrove", "author_slug": "garethrushgrove", "published": "2007-12-06T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2007/minification-a-christmas-diet/", "topic": "process"}