What is the best method to reduce the size of my Javascript and CSS files?

Question

When working with large and/or many Javascript and CSS files, what\'s the best way to reduce the file sizes?

Answer 1

YUI Compressor has my vote, for the simple reason that instead of just performing regular expression transformations on the code, it actually builds a parse tree of the code, similar to a Javascript interpreter, and then compresses it that way. It is usually very careful about how it handles the compression of identifiers.

Additionally it has a CSS compression mode, which I haven't played with as much.