Monday, November 24, 2008

Packing it in

Having finally tackled the relatively complex art of compressing JavaScript and CSS in ASP.NET, I found most of the work had already been done in the form of Packer for .NET. As I found it, Packer featured methods to compress via Dean Edward's Packer and and Doug Crockford's JSMin.


Since I wanted to combine and minify my CSS, a hunt around revealed an efficient method written by Isaac Schlueter which was incorporated into the YUI Compressor. Working from two C# ports of Isaac's code, I added CSSMinify to the pot and the result is now available.


Want more? Send a request or, even better, fetch the source and contribute your own magic.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't forget www.codeplex.com/YuiCompressor, as the Javascript obfuscation and variable renaming capabilities from YUI Compressor are there as well, which can produce a smaller minified result than Packer.

rez said...

The joy of Packer for .NET is in it's flexibility: it has Packer, JSMin and CSSMinify all rolled into one plus you can run it via a windows UI, command line or MSBuild. If I get the time, I might port CSSTidy to add another option to the project.

Personally I'm a little wary of too much obfuscation. Although I've been using Packer for quite some time, I've recently switched to JSMin which, combined with GZip, produces a smaller, faster loading result.