HTML Minification ? about express-minify

[iatek]

• 1 for html

[faeb187]

ah ok, thought issues are only bugs here, thx mate.
--> just did some tests.. you're right, the best practice seems to be minifying + gzip

Then it would be nice to have support for all of them:

• Jade
• EJS
• plain HTML

[marceloboeira]

All feature requests are issues, not only problems, or bugs.
Just to be clear, html minification, with EJS or any other engine:

Code before:

<ul>
    <li>A</li>
    <li>B</li>
    <li>C</li>
    <li>D</li>
</ul>

Code after:

<ul><li>A</li><li>B</li><li>C</li><li>D</li></ul>

With any other render optimizations, of course.

[breezewish]

Minifying template is a good idea because it can be safely cached :-)

[marceloboeira]

@joeytwiddle it could be several params, because there cases you may want to minify css inside <style> tags, or even javascript code on atributes...

cases like:

<a property="value"></a>

to

<a property=value></a>

or

<i class="icon-x"></i>

to

<i class="icon-x" />

....

[marceloboeira]

I really want to minify, because I make a lot of requests with pjax, and all the HTML comes with spacing...

[breezewish]

@marceloboeira Have you enabled gzip? According to those real world test results, gzip is really an effective way to reduce traffic.

[marceloboeira]

@breeswish yeap. but I guess html minification could help me even more.

[h2non]

+1

[PeterDaveHello]

+1 for html output minify

[faeb187]

Support for jade would be nice!! I think that's what you want ;)
For 'normal HTML' GZIP is supported in express-minify

BTW this is a feature request and not an issue.. please move

[marceloboeira]

@faeb187 weird. heh

[joeytwiddle]

I just want to warn, that occasionally HTML minification can change the meaning of a page! Specifically I experienced it when the browser was interpreting newlines as a gap, and the minifier removed those newlines (and indentation).

Given certain CSS settings (I forget which property now),

<span>
    Thing
</span>

is equivalent to:

<span> Thing </span>

But if you minify it to

<span>Thing</span>

then the resulting output is different! (You have lost the gap.)

For that reason, we stopped using Jade's built-in minifier for production, and stuck with un-minified HTML, like we had in development mode.

This is a rare issue, but it might trip people up (although if they use the minifier in both dev and prod mode, then they should be ok).

[joeytwiddle]

One other concern, if you are minifying but not caching, then you might be making the network transfer faster, but slowing down the actual response! This depends on the size of your HTML, and the speed of your minifier (related to CPU power of course). If you are caching semi-static pages, then this only applies to the first request, so no problem. And if it is optional, then the dev can make the decision for themself. Just wanted to warn about that too. ;)

[mcandre]

Bleugh, tired of waiting. Found https://www.npmjs.com/package/express-minify-html

It's not perfect, would love for regular express-minify to gain this ability...

[marceloboeira]

this is oooooooooooooold as hell. I haven't done JS since 2015. hahah a

[mcandre]

express-minify-html's last commit was in 2017 and now features a high severity vulnerability.

Let's just add basic HTML minification to regular express-minify.

[Martii]

Re: @mcandre

... and now features a high severity vulnerability.

Where would that be? e.g. no really.... citation is needed please.

Refs:

$ npm install
npm notice created a lockfile as package-lock.json. You should commit this file.
added 6 packages from 41 contributors and audited 7 packages in 0.524s
found 0 vulnerabilities

$ npm audit
                                                                                
                       === npm audit security report ===                        
                                                                                
found 0 vulnerabilities
 in 7 scanned packages

• Nothing found regarding this package back 36 pages to 2016 at https://www.npmjs.com/advisories.
• Nothing on GitHubs security parser.