The State of Minification in PHP – How 1 Project Grew into 6

• htmldoc

  2 21 6.1 PHP

  A token based HTML Document parser and minifier written in PHP. Extract attribute values and text using CSS selectors.

First let me fess up here, I have written a number of PHP minification programs in my career, and 3 years ago I started my own GitHub project to write an HTML minifier in PHP. Partly this article is to present that software to you, but it is also to show you the research I did myself to see how my project stacked up against the competition and improve my software, hopefully you will find the results interesting, as I did.

• cssdoc

  2 4 5.3 PHP

  A token based CSS parser and minifier (by hexydec)

So I already had an old CSS compiler, and in my pursuit of the highest compression, it was clear that I needed to rewrite this to compile any inline CSS in the HTML, enter another Github project - CSSdoc.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• jslite

  2 6 6.1 PHP

  A token based Javascript compiler/minifier designed for compressing inline scripts on the fly, written in PHP

But the port is not actively maintained (Last commit was Dec 2018), and was created before ES6, so I started another project called JSlite. This time I didn’t want to be too heavy handed with the compression, the goal was to minify inline Javascript in a webpage on the fly, if I could just remove the unneeded whitespace, I figured that would be enough.

• tokenise

  2 2 3.7 PHP

  A Regexp Based PHP Tokeniser

All 3 projects now used similar code layouts and a similar tokeniser, so I unified the tokeniser across the projects by moving the tokeniser into its own GitHub project. I also had to put all the projects on packagist and bring the projects together using composer.

• minify-compare

  2 0 0.0 PHP

  A script to compare PHP minfiers on speed and compression.

So I started another project to compare minifiers, the idea here was to expand on the code that downloaded all the website code to throw through my minifier, and compress the code with each of the minifiers I found, logging the time each one took, and what the compression ratio was.

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

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