I am working with asp.net mvc. I note when calling controller actions that return a view via javascript, the html markup returned is not minimized - it includes whitespace etc. Therefore the response size is larger than what it should be.
Is there a way to minimize the response from calling a controller action from javascript?
You might want to look into creating a custom filter to be applied to responses that you want to minify. A technique for this is given in this answer or in this blog post, though you will need to be sure that your implementation of the minification (removing whitespace) does not inadvertantly mess up your code (for example, if you have a javascript content, removing all newline characters can result in all of the following javascript being included in the comment, per this comment).
To this end, it may be worthwhile to use the C# port of Google's htmlcompressor library as a guide for minifying your html.
Of course, you can also just turn on gzip compression on the web server (as Justin points out in the comment below), and get the benefits of compressed output without the headache of implementing (and maintaining) what I detail above.
Note: this may not be worth the effort. A few extra spaces and newline characters in the file that is being sent down the wire will probably not amount to very much space. Even if you save a few KB (which may not even be the case), the increase in performance will most likely not be noticeable. You will however notice that when you try to look at the source of your html in order to debug any issues that you have on the client side, it will be extremely hard to read (spaces and new lines are pretty important for readability).
