Over on BloggingPro.com there is an article up where various online CSS optimization tools were tested on popular websites to see how much they could reduce the CSS file size by, without breaking the look and feel of the site.

CSS optimizers do a variety of voodoo magic to get the end result. This includes merging similar classes, removing useless properties, removing whitespace, and so forth. This can lead to code that is not very easily read by you or I, but for larger CSS files, it can condense the file size so much that it really makes a big difference in page loading times.

Many broadband users might not think this matters much, as most websites seem to load fast for them, but if each site you went to loaded even 10% faster, think of all the time it could save you over the course of a week, a month or even a year. The bandwidth savings for the website operator can also be immense. I would recommend that you always keep a copy of your human readable CSS code so that if you ever need to make any changes it does not take you a long time to figure out what you need to change, and then you can re-optimize it.

Sites like Digg, Slashdot, and Download.com were all tested, and the results were very interesting. Check out the full article at BloggingPro.

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