Prettified JSON in HTTP Response

I was randomly thinking about JSON, jq tool and the tool’s ability to prettify JSON by indenting with spaces and it’s ability to remove spaces too.

Suddenly for a second I was thinking why HTTP responses should not have spaces? If they had spaces they would look so cool right? 😂

In a moment I got the answer - yeah. You got it right. Prettifying the JSON with indentation will mean - add spaces. Space characters. Characters require space, occupy space. So, your HTTP response is going to have more data - more weight. More data means the client now has to download more data. Given many have very very low network bandwidth, they don’t need to download more data, and why would they? The computer can understand the JSON with no spaces too 😅🙈 so yeah. That’s the reason

The reason is the same for all those obscure JavaScript scripts that we download. Why is it obscure? Read here