cminify

This is a minifier for CSS, JavaScript, XML, HTML and JSON, written in C. It can also minify inline scripts, stylesheets and JSON data inside XML and HTML markup. JSON input is validated completely; for the other formats, many but not all classes of syntax errors are caught. Precise errors messages are printed when invalid input is recognized.

This project is mirrored on GitHub.

The maintainer can be contacted via the ticket systems or by e-mail at jumping-beaver@mailbox.org.

Design objectives

• Released as single binary with no dependencies except libc.
• This tool is intended to be run by Makefile recipes to copy & minimize static assets from a src/ folder to a build/release/ folder. An additional debug make-target may omit the minification. It is not envisioned to create bindings for scripting languages. Just use the command-line interface, or if really needed, usage via FFI should work fine.
• Also minify inline CSS, JavaScript and JSON in HTML and XML documents.
• Produce standard-conform output from any standard-conform input.
• The program should fail on syntax errors and must not fix them.
• This minifier is not a cleaner. It should not modify the semantics of the markup.
• Specifially, non-objectives are cleanups that can (and should) be done in the source code if they don't decrease the legibility. Detection of such optimization potential is in the scope of a linter. Linting may be added in the future but it would be a separate functionality.
  • Not removing empty CSS rules. Why would you have empty rules in the released code?
  • No merging of CSS properties.
  • Not transforming e.g. a CSS value of 1000ms to 1s; it can be done in the source code.
  • Not removing doctypes or XML headers. They do have a meaning.
  • Minification of colors is a possible future objective because doing it in the source code can decrease its legibility.
  • Not collapsing boolean HTML attributes or omitting type=text/javascript.
  • But mangling of JavaScript identifiers is a possible future objective.
• I think I will not implement the generation of JavaScript source maps because I don't see their strong benefit over reproducing issues in a debug build without minification.
• Cleaning exported SVG files is better done with a cleaner such as svgcleaner. With default options, such cleaners substantially modify the markup semantically, which may be desired for exported SVG files but not for hand-written ones. This minifier is suitable to minify hand-written SVG files.

  A useful manual cleaning recipe for exported SVG files may be:

  svgcleaner picture.svg clean.svg
  XMLLINT_INDENT="    " xmllint --format clean.svg > picture.svg
  rm clean.svg
  

  This generates standard-compliant XML files with indentation to enable manual inspection or adjustment. In a Makefile one can run this minifier on the result to create the release.

Alternatives

Some alternative minifiers choose different objectives.

- Many minifiers use advanced minification strategies that require large dependencies to parse the input into an abstract syntax tree. Usually they are focused on only one input format and provide many configuration options. If you want maximum minification, prefer such specialized tools.

This minifier is rather focused on maximizing the web developer productivity: having only one lightweight tool with few options to handle all relevant formats. Moreover its approach enables the best possible runtime performance by looping through the input in a single pass.

- Some minifiers semantically alter the content of the input files, such as fixing errors or removing doctypes, version tags, XML namespaces and encoding information.

Besides the fact that some of the information can be relevant, my opinion is that these are different concerns that should be handled by separate tools, namely linters or cleaners, and that a minifier should assume (or assert) perfect quality of the input files.

To illustrate why these are separate concerns, consider that minifiers (and linters) are supposed to run automatically in every build process, whereas cleaners or fixers are rather run manually.

- Some minifiers are quite fault-tolerant. However, if garbage is fed into a minifier then there is a problem somewhere else in the tool or process chain that is good to be alerted about. Strict parsing is a good practice to promote standard conformity.

Alternative multi-format minifier

https://github.com/tdewolff/minify

Written in Go. Minifies HTML, XML, SVG, JS, CSS, JSON. It is in the package repository of Alpine Linux and statically linked binary releases exist.

Alternative CSS minifiers

https://github.com/csstidy-c/csstidy

Written in C++, not maintained. Prints lots of warnings on valid input.

https://csstidy.sourceforge.net/usage.php

https://github.com/cssnano/cssnano

Written in JavaScript.

https://github.com/clean-css/clean-css

Written in JavaScript.

https://github.com/parcel-bundler/lightningcss

Written in Rust.

https://github.com/fmarcia/uglifycss

Written in JavaScript.

https://yui.github.io/yuicompressor/

Written in Java.

https://github.com/matthiasmullie/minify

Written in PHP. Based on regex, hence it breaks on standard-conform input such as: @import url(http://example.org/*)/**/;

http://opensource.perlig.de/rcssmin/

Written in Python. Based on regex.

Alternative JavaScript minifiers

https://terser.org/

https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS

https://swc.rs/playground

Written in Rust, but still requires NodeJS dependencies.

https://bun.sh/

Shipped as a 91 MB big single executable.

https://esbuild.github.io/

SVG optimizers

https://github.com/RazrFalcon/svgcleaner

Written in Rust.

https://github.com/svg/svgo

Written in JavaScript / NodeJS.

https://github.com/scour-project/scour

Written in Python.

Alternative HTML and XML minifiers

Here we have two very good options with no big dependencies. I still included XML and HTML minification in this minifier to cover all needs with one tool.

https://www.html-tidy.org/

Written in C.

xmllint as part of libxml2 (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2)

Written in C.