Picture It

Sometimes I think back to how I got started writing html.

I open Homesite, ready to write some html by hand like a madman:

Or, if it’s more relatable, pretend it’s 2005 and I’m opening
Dreamweaver:

And after laying down my spacer gifs and my tables and whatever
else, I would minify it by going through and deleting every
piece of garbage white space and every comment in the code so
that I could send down as few bytes as possible and make it look
like this:

Oh no wait I absolutely didn’t do that because why would I. I
don’t even know when the word “minify” entered my lexicon but it
certainly wasn’t with me back then. Which is ironic, because
that’s when we would have benefited from it the most.

Nowadays we just treat internet bandwidth as a game where the
person who sends the most JS wins. As long as it’s minified!
When did that start happening?

What Got Me Thinking

Over on
lobste.rs
someone submitted a great site,
getoutofmyhead.dev,
made by Nathaniel. His
pitch is:

Make faster, more accessible, more environmentally friendly
websites, by removing these tags from your site’s
.

I don’t think you’re likely to make an appreciable difference on
speed or with the environment, but there is something here that
is compelling to me. In 2025 it feels like having a personal
website is madness, and if we’re going to be mad, we might as
well have some fun with it. And fussing over the theoretical
correctness of one’s html, especially in ways that
won’t make a dent, is fun. To me.

And if it’s fun to make your html as small as possible,
would it be fun to make your html as pretty as
possible? The question transports me to this scene from the TV
show
The White Lotus:

TANYA: Ah, I love beauty, too.
QUENTIN: I know you do. I would die for beauty, wouldn’t you?
Kill for it. A world without beauty is not a world I want to
live in.

Fuck it: let’s die for beauty.

The Hypothesis

I can easily make this website’s source pretty, it would be fun
to do so, and it won’t hurt performance.

If my hypothesis is correct, I would expect that:

1. the raw html output after Prettier is run should look a ton
   better in the various places you can view it
2. browsers today are not good at displaying the minified content
3. the compressed size for files I no longer minify
   aren’t that much bigger due to how good compression is
4. I can’t detect any effect on performance on my fast laptop
5. I can’t think of anything else this would impact negatively

The Experiment

To test the hypothesis I took all the generated output of my
site and ran it through
Prettier (precise methodology below).

Results