snarkdown VS django-compressor

Github Repo: developit/snarkdown

Analyzing these dependencies, I found that some of them could be reduced or replaced. For example, jquery-ui is used for autocompletion and reordering. All additional widgets provided by jquery-ui (e.g. sliders, datepickers) are dead weight and can be excluded from the final bundle. Another example is marked, which was used to render the changelog. However, the changelog has a very simple structure and does not require a ~300KB library to be parsed. So instead, I use snarkdown, a lightweight alternative which is fully sufficient for this application.

I wanted to add markdown support because I like to make comments readable and walls of text are not great for that, but I didn't want anything too heavy or complicated for the end user. I ended up using a library called snarkdown. I simply copy-pasted the source code in my project under lib/snarkdown.js to remove support for images and headings because we don't need that.

In general, you can use almost any plain JS library by simply loading it in your view template. For forms specifically, you can write custom widgets and define dependencies to libraries via form assets. django-compressor might be worth a look if you go heavy on this.

Idk, it depends on how much you care about the page loading time. Even without the PurgeCSS filter, I would recommend the Django Compressor app. I use it on all my websites. It automatically merges your css/js files and minifies them (removes white spaces, comments, etc.). It also creates a unique name for the combined CSS so if you changed your CSS files, your users will always see the fresh version, not the cached by the browser one.

django_compressor - for merging and minimizing css and js assets

django-compressor with django-libsass for auto sass compilation

But isn't that what you have django-compressor for?

The external dependencies were downloaded into the static/ folder containing all frontend assets using yarn and a package.json. Other than that, yarn was not used. Next I ran a bash script that removed all files I did not need, keeping the javascript, css and font files that should be served. In html, these files where directly included. I knew that loading many files is bad, so I used django-compressor to combine them into one big file. Conveniently, this tool also provided me with a way to compile scss.