Who Compresses their HTML?

Question

Even Stack Overflow doesn't compress their HTML. Is it recommended to compress HTML? As far as I've seen, it looks like Google is the only one.... (view the source). Why isn't this standard practice?

Answer 1

I think you are confusing the source code minification of HTML, and GZIP compression. The latter is quite common (for example using mod_gzipon Apache, article here) and should be enough in most cases. It is totally internal between the server and the browser, you can't see it in the source code.

Actual minification of the HTML is not really worth doing except for sites where a saved byte can mean tens of thousands of dollars in traffic savings (like for Google.)