Building Razor views in release mode should minify HTML

[RehanSaeed]

Minifying HTML is difficult in ASP.NET MVC. Comments and white space in .cshtml files could be removed when building in release mode.

This project allows the minification of your .cshtml files using a post build event. This should be built into the tooling and not a separate product.

[NTaylorMullen]

Hey @RehanSaeed are you suggesting to add Razor minification to the Visual Studio project templates?

[RehanSaeed]

In my head I imagine minification of cshtml being just a check-box in the project properties. It could then be turned off for Debug/Development and on for Release/Staging/Production builds.

Adding this to the project as indicated in the blog is just one way of achieving this. I'm sure there are other ways which may be more integrated.

The benefits of minifying HTML are clearly shown by Mads Kristensen in his blog article. The best way of achieving minification is not during runtime as many frameworks do but during compile time where there is no performance hit to the application. Because of this fact, only Microsoft can reliably provide proper tooling to allow for this feature.

What are your thoughts?

[NTaylorMullen]

Typically all minification occurs (in asp.net 5) via third party components that are configured to run post-build/restore etc. In my mind a .cshtml minifier would fall under the same bubble. With that mindset, if we were to add default .cshtml minification it would exist at the project template level.

[RehanSaeed]

It seems then that the solution employed by Dean Hume in his blog article is very close to what you are suggesting.

This would be a very cool feature if implemented. Most developers will not go to the added trouble of adding this feature themselves. It would probably save terabytes of bandwidth when you add up how many developers use ASP.NET MVC 6 and start using this feature because it comes right out of the box.

[NTaylorMullen]

@RehanSaeed thanks for the suggestion. Will discuss this with others to see if it has a place in our templates 😄

[RehanSaeed]

Excellent. Thank You!

[glen-84]

I completely disagree with the suggested implementation.

Why not do this as part of pre-compilation? It can be an option in the RazorViewEngineOptions class.

I think that this issue should be re-opened.

/cc @guardrex

[guardrex]

@glen-84 👍 I hate what I'm doing now, so that would be great.

However, @NTaylorMullen has there been any discussion on giving Razor directives line termination characters so that they wouldn't need to be on individual lines at the top of the markup and the Razor parser can grab them from minified markup? That's my main pain point with using Gulp to minify Razor views.

[NTaylorMullen]

@guardrex no there hasn't. Not a horrible idea however, open an issue and we can discuss 😄

[RehanSaeed]

I wrote a blog post about how much bandwidth this feature might have saved the internet here.