Updated: 2012-02-24 This is probably what every web developer knows. A very basic performance improvement for your HTML pages. You should remove all the white spaces and line breaks before you publish your html page. You can view the effect directly in a DOM inspector and this post touches the same. Consider this example available from the HTML5 spec (pg 21): <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Sample page</title> </head> <body> <h1>Sample page</h1> <p>This is a <a href="demo.html">simple</a> sample.</p> <!-- this is a comment --> </body> </html> Save it in a .html file and open in your favorite browser. Next view the DOM created by this file. You can use the DOM inspector available in most of the browsers today (launch with CTRL + SHIFT + I). You will see the below DOM tree created: ...