[jacobevelyn]

How is a build step that turns your HTML into a smaller amount of HTML with the exact same behavior (by removing optional tags) different from a "minification" step that turns your HTML or JS into a smaller amount of HTML/JS with the exact same behavior?

This is minification, isn't it?

[tedmiston]

Updated to clarify my comment as a reference to browser performance not file size.

[the_duke]

Smaller file size -> faster loading (in theory... if gzipped, it's probably redundant).

Possibly faster parsing, because the parser has less HTML so go through. (also probably not valid, because I'd be pretty sure that reading a string from memory is not the bottleneck in parsing, compared to logic, memory allocations, etc).

It could make a difference for Googles server infrastructure though.

If they have to download a tiny bit less, and save a tiny bit on CPU cycles and memory for each page, , it might still lead to considerably savings.