Just from a
quick check of
http://en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/monobook/main.css?55, removing all the
possible white space will reduce it in size from 30882 bytes to 23411 bytes,
saving 7471 bytes (24%). That's a drastic change in size, and if done would
save a ton of bandwidth (over time).
It's small compared to actual compression, though.
Exactly. To quantify with mod_deflate :
------------------------------------
root@bling:/var/www/hosts/mediawiki/wiki# curl --silent --include --head
http://192.168.0.64/wiki/skins/monobook/main.css?55
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2007 01:20:04 GMT
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Mon, 05 Feb 2007 23:57:09 GMT
ETag: "709d-428c37389ff40"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 28829
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Cache-Control: max-age=2592000, public
Content-Type: text/css
root@bling:/var/www/hosts/mediawiki/wiki# curl --silent --include --head --header
"Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate"
http://192.168.0.64/wiki/skins/monobook/main.css?55
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2007 01:20:12 GMT
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Mon, 05 Feb 2007 23:57:09 GMT
ETag: "709d-428c37389ff40"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Content-Encoding: gzip
Cache-Control: max-age=2592000, public
Content-Length: 7763
Content-Type: text/css
root@bling:/var/www/hosts/mediawiki/wiki#
------------------------------------
I.e. 28829 bytes reduced to 7763 bytes saves 21066 bytes,
which means a saving of 73%.
And you don't have shadow versions of files, and the version that gets sent to
clients is still legible (and it's the same one that developers know and are
familiar with).
[P.s. please ignore the "public" directive in the cache-control line above,
it's not there by default, I've just manually overridden it to test
stuff. ]
All the best,
Nick.