Thanks for pointing these out. For CSS and JavaScript minification, I’ve been very happy with YUI Compressor:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/

Also, I find the Java version of Tidy is less of a hassle to use:

http://jtidy.sourceforge.net/

Cheers!

+1 for YUI Compressor. It’s been proven to be very safe with variables in Javascript.

To optmize PNG images, I use PNGGauntlet. It’s a very nice GUI for the PNGout utility and it’s freeware.

I second the recommendation for PNGGauntlet/PNGOUT. According to the author of PNGOUT, Ken Silverman, it can “often beat other programs by 5-10%”. Not bad.

OptiPNG by default runs through only about ten compression methods. To go through the full lot (it’s in the high hundreds) to find the best IDAT compression method use:
optipng -zc1-9 -zm1-9 -zs0-3 -f0-5 file.png

Note this can take some time if you are working with medium to large PNG files but can bite off a few more bytes off your file without loosing data. I’ve found it most useful when working with web applications that feature a heavy icon set and with so many tiny images it was definitely worth it. We ran into one issue whereby OptiPNG would change the colour type of the image to achieve a better compression (this is on by default) but the output would render strangely in IE and Firefox under Windows. Add the -nc flag to disable colour type reduction.

Thanks for the article.

Just tested as suggested in the comments here, and PngOut beats OptiPNG in all my sample images (PNGs coming out of Photoshop’s Save for web). Anyway, for most of the images, the compression gain was trivial (6% with PngOut and 3% with OptiPNG).

Nice article, but what i’m really interested in, is minify/compress scripts on-the-fly, a.k.a. in a production environment.
I did this combined with combining css and javascript files. The compressed versions are cached server side, and only regenerated if a requested file has been changed server side. This is a big advantage, because the development version keeps it’s markup and comments, only if requested through the website, a new compressed/minified copy will be made and stored in a cache file.

For javascript i’m using a php port of JSMin, and for CSS a custom regex script. I’ve looked into CSSTidy (php port also), but couldn’t get it to work properly.. The only output i got was the html’ed output to the browser.

Is there such thing for compressing png’s?

I definitely second the suggestion for YUI Compressor. Great information at this blog.