WebMarkupMin: Configuring Minification Level

When WebMarkupMin is first added to a web project, by default the minification is set very high and found that it caused my pages not to be considered valid HTML and worse, things looking slightly broken.

WebMinMarkup minified things that I didn’t even think required minification and the following things got stripped out of the page:

• End HTML tags.
• Quotes.
• Protocols from attributes.
• Form input type attribute.

The good thing is, the level of minification can be controlled by creating a configuration file inside the App_Start directory of your MVC project. I thought it was be useful to post a copy of my WebMinMarkup configuration file for reference when working on future MVC projects and might also prove useful for others as well.

public class WebMarkupMinConfig
{
    public static void Configure(WebMarkupMinConfiguration configuration)
    {
        configuration.AllowMinificationInDebugMode = false;
        configuration.AllowCompressionInDebugMode = false;
        configuration.DisablePoweredByHttpHeaders = true;

        DefaultLogger.Current = new ThrowExceptionLogger();

        IHtmlMinificationManager htmlMinificationManager = HtmlMinificationManager.Current;
        HtmlMinificationSettings htmlMinificationSettings = htmlMinificationManager.MinificationSettings;
        htmlMinificationSettings.RemoveRedundantAttributes = true;
        htmlMinificationSettings.RemoveHttpProtocolFromAttributes = false;
        htmlMinificationSettings.RemoveHttpsProtocolFromAttributes = false;
        htmlMinificationSettings.AttributeQuotesRemovalMode = HtmlAttributeQuotesRemovalMode.KeepQuotes;
        htmlMinificationSettings.RemoveOptionalEndTags = false;
        htmlMinificationSettings.RemoveEmptyAttributes = false;
        htmlMinificationSettings.PreservableAttributeList = "input[type]";

        IXhtmlMinificationManager xhtmlMinificationManager = XhtmlMinificationManager.Current;
        XhtmlMinificationSettings xhtmlMinificationSettings = xhtmlMinificationManager.MinificationSettings;
        xhtmlMinificationSettings.RemoveRedundantAttributes = true;
        xhtmlMinificationSettings.RemoveHttpProtocolFromAttributes = false;
        xhtmlMinificationSettings.RemoveHttpsProtocolFromAttributes = false;
        xhtmlMinificationSettings.RemoveEmptyAttributes = false;

        IXmlMinificationManager xmlMinificationManager = XmlMinificationManager.Current;
        XmlMinificationSettings xmlMinificationSettings = xmlMinificationManager.MinificationSettings;
        xmlMinificationSettings.CollapseTagsWithoutContent = true;

        IHttpCompressionManager httpCompressionManager = HttpCompressionManager.Current;
        httpCompressionManager.CompressorFactories = new List<ICompressorFactory>
        {
            new DeflateCompressorFactory(),
            new GZipCompressorFactory()
        };
    }
}

Once the configuration file is added to your project, the last thing you need to do is add a reference in the Global.asax file.

protected void Application_Start()
{
    // Compression.
    WebMarkupMinConfig.Configure(WebMarkupMinConfiguration.Instance);
}