Why is the site’s markup not formatted nicely?
PrevNode LinkNextSome web developers told me they like to keep the markup they emit properly formatted and indented. I dislike doing that because:
It may harm its load time.
May provide users who look at it the illusion that it is the ultimate, editable/patch-able source code. I already received one patch written directly against the generated page of one of my sites, which was not immediately usable for me.
People are unlikely to use my site's markup to learn web technologies. For this, I recommend other resources.
The ultimate sources used to generate the markups are kept properly formatted, and are human-readable and editable, in public version-control repositories, so it's not as if I keep my code non-indented.
Keeping the served markup properly formatted may be harder than simply minifying it, and the proper formatting may vary according to taste.
Just like we often compile and link source codes to binary executables and libraries, (even if the source code is publicly available), so we can think of minifying web markups as compiling them in order to improve the user experience. That does not imply I do that in order to obscure the inner mechanisms of the software.
Also see:
"Perfectionism" post on Joel on Software - cites formatted HTML as an example.