Last week Fry-IT released CheckoutableTemplates which is a templating module add-on for Zope. It includes a module called slimmer.py which can compress XHTML, HTML and CSS. The CSS had a flaw in it that I hadn't foreseen. This flaw arises when you use M$ Internet Explorer hacks like this for example:

If you do a speed report on Plone.org you notice that the three biggest files it services are plone.css, plone_javascripts.js and index.html. If you run these through my little slimmer whitespace optimizing program in Python you get the following results:

 $ python slimmer.py --test http://plone.org/plone.css
 Took 0.016 seconds
 Bytes before: 29355
 Bytes after:  20265
 Bytes saved:  9090  (69.0% of original size)

 $ python slimmer.py --test http://plone.org/plone_javascripts.js
 Took 0.057 seconds
 Bytes before: 27251
 Bytes after:  19974
 Bytes saved:  7277  (73.0% of original size)

 $ python slimmer.py --test http://plone.org/ 
 Took 0.029 seconds
 Bytes before: 37186
 Bytes after:  26466
 Bytes saved:  10720 (10K)  (71.0% of original size)

Thanks to Seb Bacon's suggestion I've today looked at enabling smooth scrolling in Javascript for when you click on anchor links. See the result here if you're impatient

In Python you indicate whether a function/method is private by naming it so that it starts with an _ underscore like this:

Last week I wrote about a hope of slimming "private functions in Javascript" but realized that it was futile since it's not really possible. It led me to another idea where I rewrite all long-named functions within the code and relabel them at the end. The idea is that code that looks like this: