Colovic Vladan

I needed to implement some CSS compression, and minification, so I made some tests regarding the improvements. The content is delivered by Apache’s GZIP deflate, so the only thing to check was the effect of putting all CSS in one file, and packing it afterwards. For me, the results were surprising.

1. Original file, after GZIP (19 CSS files) – 22Kb
2. Just included into one big file – 17Kb
3. In one file, removed comments and newlines -11kb
4. One file, PHP cssTidy-ed – low compression – 10Kb
5. One file, PHP cssTidy-ed – high compression – 10Kb
6. One file, PHP cssTidy-ed – highest compression – 10Kb

The most interesting part was a difference between 1. and 2. I’m not sure why this happened. The other curious thing is that basically cssTidy compression does not improve much (besides it does changed some margin that I noticed, and did not wanted).

My conclusion: packing all CSS in one file and removing comments and  newlines is quite enough.

Something I did not know, but when I found it on this post, then I just realized that is include somewhere in PHP manual, so I quote from original manual entry.

“If called from the global scope, then execution of the current script file is ended. If the current script file was include()-ed or require()-ed, then control is passed back to the calling file. Furthermore, if the current script file was include()-ed, then the value given to return() will be returned as the value of the include() call. If return() is called from within the main script file, then script execution ends.”