I have been experimenting recently with HTML optimization but haven't applied it yet. But I have applied this now to my stylsheets. The size gain is 33%! (1577 bytes to 1027 bytes) However, the speed gain involves also the time to perform the optimization so the speed gain will obviously be less than 33%. But the optimization takes, on this slow computer, 0.004 seconds so in approximate terms the speed gain is also 33%. This is on a stylesheet file with some but short and few comments.

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)

If you have some code that you need to optimise, like some Javascript code that is well commented but costs too many bytes of download for your users then you might want to use my slimmer web service. I'll let a Python example speak for itself:

I've wanted to Gzip the static content (CSS & Javascript) on my sites for a long time but never found a good enough solution. mod_gzip is out of the question because as far as I've understood it it does a compression on the fly, every time you request the file.

The current project I'm working has at the time of writing 20 different forms (90% model forms) instantiated in different scenarios. Django doesn't automatically strip whitespace in text based fields. So instead of doing this: