Minify HTML/PHP

Question

I'm using gzip to compress my html/php files along with js/css/etc. This reduces the payload quite nicely but I also want to 'minify' my markup of both .html and .php pages. Ideally I'd like to control this from a .htaccess file (where I also do the gzipping) rather than the having to include php to each file.

I'd like the output to be like that of http://google.com or http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/w3-total-cache/ and http://css-tricks.com (both produced by W3 Total Cache plugin for WordPress).

Can anyone recommend a good way to do this.

Answer 1

Looking at the examples, minifying the HTML output does almost nothing. Think about it: Minifying is great for Javascript which uses many repeating variable and function names, as one of the main things minifying does is shorten them and all references to them.

HTML markup, on the other hand, has no concept of variables or functions. Most of the weight of the page is from actual markup and content. This cannot be minified. Even form variables need to be left alone as they must have their original values to be processed correctly by the server.

Gzipping will already compress the whitespace very efficiently. In HTML, this is really all that can be done.

Also, minifying PHP doesn't apply, because even though it has variables and functions, it is never sent to the client. Shortening the names has no performance benefit for something compiled on the server.

If you are determined to minify your html, check out the source code for the WordPress plugin that does it. That's the beauty of open source. However, I suspect the gains will be negligible as compared to Gzipping.