Poll: Do you indent your HTML?

The code should be indented, otherwise it’s a pain to maintain. But the production code doesn’t have to be the same as development code!
A deployment of a website could be a process that automatically strips all “unnecessary” whitespace, thus reducing the size of pages.

I agree with the previous commenter, it’s a very good idea to keep an editing version of your textual resources, and to minify them for live use.

I would recommend to gzip and to set your cache/expiration headers, which is a lot more important to me than just a few spaces and tabs (and here we’re talking only about textual files).

Google even advertises sorting your markup alphabetically and quoting consistently to maximize the results of the gzip compression, but I suppose this is practical mostly for high traffic websites, where every octet counts.

I thought I was the last person still writing HTML! The editors that most people use add a lot more redundancy and superfluous code than a few spaces, so I don’t even give it a thought.

Notepad creates the cleanest code!

If I use an editor, it indent for me automatically. If I use Notepad++, I consider that a newline between important tags and sections of code is enough, because syntax highlighting will help me.

What I do, especially with large pages, is to have all the spaces removed from the page by using the compact format (or at least go to Plain [left justified]) before uploading and then when I need to edit it, switch back to hierarchical again.

For a code review, if the HTML was not indented OR not commented OR it did not validate 100%, I would reject it outright.

I indent the code I write for my own use! And I use comments. Who knows -what- I’ll remember when I look at it next.

“Indenting Wastes Space …”
yah right {/heavy sarcasm!}

The same people probably also say
“Comments Waste Space …”
“Long, english-like variable names waste space …”

In my experience there are 2 groups of people who use those “arguments”. First is the “Dinosaurs” (or more accurately, the “Pioneers”) who wrote assembler code in the ’60s and ’70s when Core memory (not RAM, Core) was measured in KB instead of GB. Back when a mainframe costing millions of dollars had (several) orders of magnitude less CPU power, memory and tape (disk) storage than the current PC sitting on your desktop.

The other group is the “self taught experts”. Too bad they really don’t know what they are talking about.

The simple reality of programming today is that CPU’s are so fast that a few spaces on a line a trivial, even if the code is interpreted instead of compiled. But those few spaces per line make a huge difference to developers trying to understand the intent of the code.

Plaster, if you want to avoid problems, your production code MUST be IDENTICAL to your development code (with trivial allowances for location differences etc between dev and prod) which are hopefully handled by the environment rather than explicitly in the code.

Granted, compilers will strip spaces, comments and shorten variables, but compilers have been very thoroughly tested to prove they do not compromise the code. If you do those type of changes “manually” you are open to introducing all sorts of errors.

Looking forward to reading more. Great blog.Really looking forward to read more. Cool.