minhtml - a Node.JS package for easily minifying HTML

minhtml, short for "minify html" is a highly configurable, well-tested, JavaScript-based HTML minifier. It also supports Mustache templates.

See corresponding blog post by the original author for all the gory details of how it works, description of each option, testing results and conclusions.

Test suite is available online.

Minification comparison

How does minhtml compare to other solutions — HTML Minifier from Will Peavy (1st result in Google search for "html minifier") as well as minimize?

Site	Original size (KB)	minhtml	minimize	Will Peavy
Google	49	44	49	51
Twitter	69	61	68	68
Stack Overflow	202	164	178	178
minhtml	222	136	200	214
Bootstrap CSS	271	260	269	229
BBC	333	307	331	332
Amazon	459	410	449	461
Wikipedia	692	558	671	697
New York Times	770	688	766	755
Eloquent Javascript	870	815	840	864
NBC	1857	1712	1844	1864
ES draft	5912	5194	5384	n/a

Options Quick Reference

Most of the options are disabled by default.

Option	Description	Default
caseSensitive	Treat attributes in case sensitive manner (useful for custom HTML tags)	false
collapseBooleanAttributes	Omit attribute values from boolean attributes	false
collapseInlineTagWhitespace	Don't leave any spaces between display:inline; elements when collapsing. Must be used in conjunction with collapseWhitespace=true	false
collapseWhitespace	Collapse white space that contributes to text nodes in a document tree	false
conservativeCollapse	Always collapse to 1 space (never remove it entirely). Must be used in conjunction with collapseWhitespace=true	false
continueOnParseError	Handle parse errors instead of aborting.	false
customAttrAssign	Arrays of regex'es that allow to support custom attribute assign expressions (e.g. '<div flex?="{{mode != cover}}"></div>')	[ ]
customAttrCollapse	Regex that specifies custom attribute to strip newlines from (e.g. /ng-class/)
customAttrSurround	Arrays of regex'es that allow to support custom attribute surround expressions (e.g. <input {{#if value}}checked="checked"{{/if}}>)	[ ]
customEventAttributes	Arrays of regex'es that allow to support custom event attributes for minifyJS (e.g. ng-click)	[ /^on[a-z]{3,}$/ ]
decodeEntities	Use direct Unicode characters whenever possible	false
html5	Parse input according to HTML5 specifications	true
ignoreCustomComments	Array of regex'es that allow to ignore certain comments, when matched	[ /^!/, /^\s*#/ ]
ignoreCustomFragments	Array of regex'es that allow to ignore certain fragments, when matched (e.g. <?php ... ?>, {{ ... }}, etc.)	[ /<%[\s\S]*?%>/, /<\?[\s\S]*?\?>/ ]
includeAutoGeneratedTags	Insert tags generated by HTML parser	true
keepClosingSlash	Keep the trailing slash on singleton elements	false
maxLineLength	Specify a maximum line length. Compressed output will be split by newlines at valid HTML split-points
minifyCSS	Minify CSS in style elements and style attributes (uses clean-css)	false (could be true, Object, Function(text, type))
minifyJS	Minify JavaScript in script elements and event attributes (uses Terser)	false (could be true, Object, Function(text, inline))
minifyURLs	Minify URLs in various attributes (uses relateurl)	false (could be String, Object, Function(text))
preserveLineBreaks	Always collapse to 1 line break (never remove it entirely) when whitespace between tags include a line break. Must be used in conjunction with collapseWhitespace=true	false
preventAttributesEscaping	Prevents the escaping of the values of attributes	false
processConditionalComments	Process contents of conditional comments through minifier	false
processScripts	Array of strings corresponding to types of script elements to process through minifier (e.g. text/ng-template, text/x-handlebars-template, etc.)	[ ]
quoteCharacter	Type of quote to use for attribute values (' or ")
removeAttributeQuotes	Remove quotes around attributes when possible	false
removeComments	Strip HTML comments	false
removeEmptyAttributes	Remove all attributes with whitespace-only values	false (could be true, Function(attrName, tag))
removeEmptyElements	Remove all elements with empty contents	false
removeOptionalTags	Remove optional tags	false
removeRedundantAttributes	Remove attributes when value matches default.	false
removeScriptTypeAttributes	Remove type="text/javascript" from script tags. Other type attribute values are left intact	false
removeStyleLinkTypeAttributes	Remove type="text/css" from style and link tags. Other type attribute values are left intact	false
removeTagWhitespace	Remove space between attributes whenever possible. Note that this will result in invalid HTML!	false
sortAttributes	Sort attributes by frequency	false
sortClassName	Sort style classes by frequency	false
trimCustomFragments	Trim white space around ignoreCustomFragments.	false
useShortDoctype	Replaces the doctype with the short (HTML5) doctype	false

Sorting attributes / style classes

Minifier options like sortAttributes and sortClassName won't impact the plain-text size of the output. However, they form long repetitive chains of characters that should improve compression ratio of gzip used in HTTP compression.

Special cases

Ignoring chunks of markup

If you have chunks of markup you would like preserved, you can wrap them <!-- htmlmin:ignore -->.

Preserving SVG tags

SVG tags are automatically recognized, and when they are minified, both case-sensitivity and closing-slashes are preserved, regardless of the minification settings used for the rest of the file.

Working with invalid markup

minhtml can't work with invalid or partial chunks of markup. This is because it parses markup into a tree structure, then modifies it (removing anything that was specified for removal, ignoring anything that was specified to be ignored, etc.), then it creates a markup out of that tree and returns it.

Input markup (e.g. <p id="">foo)

↓

Internal representation of markup in a form of tree (e.g. { tag: "p", attr: "id", children: ["foo"] })

↓

Transformation of internal representation (e.g. removal of id attribute)

↓

Output of resulting markup (e.g. <p>foo</p>)

minhtml can't know that original markup was only half of the tree; it does its best to try to parse it as a full tree and it loses information about tree being malformed or partial in the beginning. As a result, it can't create a partial/malformed tree at the time of the output.

Installation Instructions

From NPM for use as a (global) command line app:

npm install minhtml -g

From NPM for programmatic use:

npm install minhtml

From Git:

git clone https://github.com/R4356th/minhtml.git
cd minhtml
npm link .

Usage

Note that almost all options are disabled by default. For command line usage, please see minhtml --help for a list of available options. Experiment and find what works best for you and your project.

• Sample command line: minhtml --collapse-whitespace --remove-comments --remove-optional-tags --remove-redundant-attributes --remove-script-type-attributes --use-short-doctype --minify-css true --minify-js true

Node.js

var minify = require('minhtml').minify;
var result = await minify('<p title="blah" id="moo">foo</p>', {
  removeAttributeQuotes: true
});
result; // '<p title=blah id=moo>foo</p>'

Running benchmarks

Benchmarks for minified HTML:

node benchmark.js