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I need to have some static HTML pages on a project I am making with Go. I used the http.FileServer, but I noticed it was slower than rendering with html/templates, and I didn't like seeing the .html at the end of the routes. So I went with this solution:

// home.go    
package pages

import "strings"

var Home string

func init() {
    html := `
        <!DOCTYPE html>
        <html>
            <head>
                <title>Page Title</title>
            </head>
            <body>
                <h1>Home Page</h1>
            </body>
        </html>
    `

    htmlArray := strings.Fields(html)
    htmlJoined := strings.Join(htmlArray, " ")
    Home = strings.Replace(htmlJoined, "> <", "><", -1)
}

and:

// main.go
package main

import (
    "net/http"
    "io"

    "my_project/router"
    "my_project/pages"
)

func main() {
    router.On("GET", "/", home)
    http.HandleFunc("/", router.Handle)
    http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}

func home(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    io.WriteString(w, pages.Home)
}

This all seems to be working well. If I understand correctly, the minification takes place when the app starts, and not on each request.

Is there anything wrong with this approach?

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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  • The Home variable can be modified by any package. Pretty dangerous. Maybe use a private variable (or a struct that contains a private string field) and a getter method.
  • You're assuming that any HTML page won't be modified semantically by your transformation. This is correct for your minimalistic example, but not in the general case. For example, within <pre> or <code> tags, whitespace matters. There are probably many other ways this could go wrong. You should probably use a minifier package like this one instead.

Edit: actually, your strings.Replace(htmlJoined, "> <", "><", -1) will probably have undesired effects even for very simple HTML pages. Consider:

this pretty <em>simple</em> <a href="http://example.com">example</a>.

If you delete the space between </em> and <a … >, it effectively deletes the visible space between "simple" and "example" when you display the page. All the more reason to use a minifier library.

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