Does formatted HTML takes up more space - html

If one views the source code of http://www.google.com, it's highly minified. Even the html part. I am just wondering if formatted html takes up more space than minified HTML.
All I can think of is, that in formatted html, the characters : spaces, tabs and newline take space. And that is the only scope where html minification can save memory.

Yes, your thinking is correct. Removing whitespace and compressing the HTML will result in smaller download sizes.
If you'd like to see test cases for HTML minification, check out this blog post on Perfection Kills.
Excerpt:
Original size: 217KB (35.8KB gzipped)
Minified size: 206.6KB (34.3KB gzipped)
Savings: 10.4KB (1.5KB gzipped)
Minifying home page of amazon.com saves about 10KB with uncompressed
document, and only 1.5KB with compressed one.

Yes, there’s a difference. But for many (most?) websites this difference is not worth thinking about, because (1) the server will probably serve the HTML gzipped anyway, and (2) you don’t have enough pageviews to make the difference substantial. (Google does.)

Yes, minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript by removing spaces, tabs, newlines, and comments saves on bandwidth cost.
In addition to minifying the HTML, you should also be certain your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is being GZIP'ed when being sent over the wire for even better performance. For more information about GZIP, read: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#gzip
I would also like to add that it is very important to think about bandwidth cost and page speed to any degree this day in age. Mobile web users are on a large upward swing. Even if you are not expecting a large mobile draw from your site, you are doing a disserve to those trying to access your site on their mobile 3G devices by not taking the proper considerations into bandwidth cost and speed.

Related

What is the difference between "jquery.min.css" and "jquery.css"?

It is a simple doubt.
What is the difference between
http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.1.0/jquery.mobile-1.1.0.css
and
http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.1.0/jquery.mobile-1.1.0.min.css
Anything wrong happen If i replace any of them with other, in a live site? if both were untouched(not edited previously)?
You can replace them interchangeably.
The regular one is meant for examination and (if necessary) editing. The minified version makes the file as small as possible by removing all the whitespace it can. This makes it load faster for users.
The min version is minified, compressed. Functionally they should be identical. The minified version is smaller and downloads faster and should be used in production, but is unreadable and therefore bad during development.
The one with min simply means it's minified, the one without min is human readable.
To quote from Wikipedia:
Minification (also minimisation or minimization), in computer programming languages and especially JavaScript, is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code, without changing its functionality. These unnecessary characters usually include white space characters, new line characters, comments, and sometimes block delimiters, which are used to add readability to the code but are not required for it to execute.
The purpose of minifying code is obvious in web once you compare their sizes: removing unnecessary characters significantly reduces the size of the file that need to be transferred.
The min version is a minified version of the "cegular" CSS file. The end result is exactly the same (same styles are applied). The min version is just smaller, as unnecessary white-space and such are stripped from the file.
The reason for this is to save bandwith and speed up page load times as the browser has to download less stuff in order to render the page.
min means minified version of a cegular css file. The result will be the same, although the min will load faster. You should probably not delete the file if your website is very large, but if its a small website, you can probably delte it.
-BurningPotato
By using minified version of files following advantages could be experienced.
It will drastically reduce loading times and bandwidth usage on your
website.
It also improves site speed and accessibility, directly
translating into a better user experience.
Minification has become standard practice for page optimization.
All major JavaScript library developers (bootstrap, JQuery, AngularJS, etc.) provide minified versions of their files for production deployments, usually denoted with a min.js name extension.
In summary: developers tend to use spacing, comments and well-named variables to make code and markup readable for themselves. This is a plus in the development phase, it becomes a negative when it comes to serving your pages. When minified, comments and extra spaces will be removed saving up file size and reducing bandwidth of network.
Hence it is better to use minified version in your PROD environment.
You may have a look on this

How can I minimize HTML for performance using PHP

I'm somewhat new to the concept of minimization, but it seems simple enough. I understand how libraries like jQuery can benefit from minimization, but my question is whether or not it should be extended to HTML and CSS (I've seen CSS resets minimize code, so perhaps the increase in performance has been measured).
First, I have no idea how to measure the increased performance, but I was wondering if any of you had any knowledge or experience about the magnitude of performance increase one could expect when minimizing HTML and CSS code (substantial, negligible, etc).
Finally, I know HTML and especially XHTML should be as readable as possible to whoever maintains the code, which why I was thinking it would be best to minimize this code at the time of rendering only, with PHP. If this is viable, what is the best way of doing this? Just trimming the HTML and CSS ($html = trim($html);)?
Yahoo has some high performance website rules. I have quoted some of the rules. Read it carefully. These rules answers your question.
The time it takes to transfer an HTTP request and response across the network can be significantly reduced by decisions made by front-end engineers. It's true that the end-user's bandwidth speed, Internet service provider, proximity to peering exchange points, etc. are beyond the control of the development team. But there are other variables that affect response times. Compression reduces response times by reducing the size of the HTTP response.
Minification is the practice of removing unnecessary characters from code to reduce its size thereby improving load times. When code is minified all comments are removed, as well as unneeded white space characters (space, newline, and tab). In the case of JavaScript, this improves response time performance because the size of the downloaded file is reduced. Two popular tools for minifying JavaScript code are JSMin and YUI Compressor. The YUI compressor can also minify CSS.
So minimizing any content thats going to be transferred over HTTP reduces transfer time. Hence gives a head start on rendering. So your website performs faster. If you enable compression, site performance improvement will be noticeable. Also if you compress and minify Javascript, HTML and CSS all things will be faster.
To measure performance in this case you can use some tool like YSlow (in firefox > firebug) or the Profile tab in Chrome inspector.
There are many things to do to speed up a webpage. If you have many small images (icons) maybe it is a good idea join all in a big image and pick the correct using css. And put css and script tags in order.
<?php header('Expires: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s \G\M\T', time() + 3600));
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT");
header('X-UA-Compatible: IE=Edge,chrome=1');
function ob_html_compress($buf){
return preg_replace(array('/<!--(?>(?!\[).)(.*)(?>(?!\]).)-->/Uis','/[[:blank:]]+/'),array('',' '),str_replace(array("\n","\r","\t"),'',$buf));
}
ob_start("ob_html_compress"); ?>
<?php // Your Code ?>
<?php ob_end_flush(); ?>
I'm using my simple php script for optimize HTML in one line
See example: http://cs.lviv.pro/

Overhead of HTML whitespace indentation

I started wondering what is the overall impact of using whitespaces to indent html documents.
Why not simply use tabs to indent? Wouldn't this be more cost-effective: 1 char (\t) vs. example 4 chars (spaces)?
I did little experimenting by converting an asp.net-page to use tabs and compared sizes of rendered markups.
By replacing only one partial view's white space caused a page of 22kb size to be reduced to 19,4kb -> that's 12% reduction. Changing all indentation, page ended up allocating 16,7kb - 24% reduction! (used chrome dev tools and Fiddler for verifying)
Is my reasoning sound? Should tabs be used primary for indentation of HTML? Is there any reason to use spaces(such as compatibility with exotic browsers)?
ps. Stackoverflow seems to use spaces too. Converting SO main page to use tabs gave 9% reduction. Is this valid observation? If so, why haven’t they used tabs?
StackOverflow uses HTTP Compression - when this is turned on, the differences between using spaces versus tabs goes down - a lot.
You need to run your tests against the compressed versions for reliable results.
You do have a point though for the cases when a browser does not support the compression schemes the server supports.
First thing : html doesn't have a rule of doing indentation. It's done by programmers for code readability and program's structure. More ever We can reduce size taken by indents and white spaces by compression.
Minify/compact/compressing HTML : Compacting HTML code, can save many bytes of data and speed up downloading, parsing, and execution time.
StackOverflow uses HTTP Compression
Minifying HTML has the same benefits as those for minifying CSS and JS: reducing network latency, enhancing compression, and faster browser loading and execution. Moreover, HTML frequently contains inline JS code (in tags) and inline CSS (in tags), so it is useful to minify these as well.
Note: This rule is experimental and is currently focused on size reduction rather than strict HTML well-formedness. Future versions of the rule will also take into account correctness. For details on the current behavior, see the Page Speed wiki.
Tip: When you run Page Speed against a page referencing HTML files, it automatically runs the Page Speed HTML compactor (which will in turn apply JSMin and cssmin.js to any inline JavaScript and CSS) on the files and saves the minified output to a configurable directory.
Refer : http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/payload.html#MinifyHTML
Why not simply use tabs to indent? Wouldn't this be more cost-effective: 1 char (\t) vs. example 4 chars (spaces)?
If you're worried about downloaded HTML size, you won't fuss over tabs-vs-spaces — you'll compress your HTML as it goes over the wire and minify your markup, CSS, and Javascript, which provide real savings and don't interfere with your own coding guidelines.

HTML compression

Most web pages are filled with significant amounts of whitespace and other useless characters which result in wasted bandwidth for both the client and server. This is especially true with large pages containing complex table structures and CSS styles defined at the level. It seems like good practice to preprocess all your HTML files before publishing, as this will save a lot of bandwidth, and where I live, bandwidth aint cheap.
It goes without saying that the optimisation should not affect the appearance of the page in any way (According to the HTML standard), or break any embedded Javascript or backend ASP code, etc.
Some of the functions I'd like to perform are:
Removal of all whitespace and carriage returns. The parser needs to be smart enough to not strip whitespace from inside string literals. Removal of space between HTML elements or attributes is mostly safe, but iirc browsers will render the single space between div or span tags, so these shouldn't be stripped.
Remove all comments from HTML and client side scripts
Remove redundant attribute values. e.g. <option selected="selected"> can be replaced with <option selected>
As if this wasn't enough, I'd like to take it even farther and compress the CSS styles too. Pages with large tables often contain huge amounts of code like the following: <td style="TdInnerStyleBlaBlaBla">. The page would be smaller if the style label was small. e.g. <td style="x">. To this end, it would be great to have a tool that could rename all your styles to identifiers comprised of the least number of characters possible. If there are too many styles to represent with the set of allowable single digit identifiers, then it would be necessary to move to larger identifiers, prioritising the smaller identifiers for the styles which are used the most.
In theory it should be quite easy to build a piece of software to do all this, as there are many XML parsers available to do the heavy lifting. Surely someone's already created a tool which can do all these things and is reliable enough to use on real life projects. Does anyone here have experience with doing this?
The term you're probably after is 'minify' or 'minification'.
This is very similar to an existing conversation which you may find helpfull:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/728260/html-minification
Also, depending on the web server you use and the browser used to look at your site, it is likely that your server is already compressing data without you having to do anything:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_compression
your 3 points are actually called "Minimizing HTML/JS/CSS"
Can have a look these:
HTML online minimizer/compressor?
http://tidy.sourceforge.net/
I have done some compression HTML/JS/CSS too, in my personal distributed crawler. which use gzip, bzip2, or 7zip
gzip = fastest, ~12-25% original filesize
bzip2 = normal, ~10-20% original filesize
7zip = slow, ~7-15% original filesize

HTML Line Spacing & Compact Code

I have the following example code:
<body>
<div id="a"></div>
<div id="b"></div>
</body>
If I add empty lines between each of my original lines, like this:
<body>
<div id="a"></div>
<div id="b"></div>
</body>
does that do anything to my site's performance? Will the page load slower?
Yes, compact code speeds up page loading due to decreased payload...but not by a measurable amount, at least in most cases, unless your page is massive you won't see a difference.
Pages should be delivered via gzip, making the size difference between spaced and un-spaced negligible, just do what's readable to you, you'll thank yourself later. As with everything, you have to weight the costs, in this case a very minor difference in payload size, with what's easiest to maintain for you.
In theory, yes.
For the server, if it has to send out a 1MB file to each client, it has to spend n amount of time and resources sending out that one file. Now, if you were able to cut the file size in half, the time and resources it would take per user on the server would be .5n.
For the client, it has to download a file. Assuming a download rate of 25KB/S, a 1MB file would take 41 seconds to download. A .5MB file would take 20.5s. Thats a savings of 20 seconds by reducing the file size.
However, in practice. No, I would not worry about it, unless you're dealing with audio/video/picture data. That's because a character in a HTML document is only a couple bytes. Sure, you might have lets say 100 extra characters that you could trim and remove - whitespace for instance. At most you'd save up an additional 1KB per page.
I wouldn't be too concerned about it, unless you're developing an application or solution where it needs to be compact. But any modern or sub-modern computer won't break with 1KB extra data in their HTML file.
in your example, it saves up 3 bytes of code... so i don't think it has any noticeable effect on page loading time in modern times and it's internet speed. a better improvement would be to send your page gziped.
Page loading and compact code ? yes it really make things better as additional newlines and spaces are nothing but characters which need to be downloaded on the client end.
However i will suggest you to see it as part of the big strategy for optimization.
I will suggest you to take a look at YSlow/Yahoo Guidelines which will help you understand the different parts of "strategy" which is added to server and client components also. And collective results are just amazing for big sites.