When you put a site "live" do you compress your CSS code? Is the space saved and performance gained really that significant?

I know my professor always said to maintain 2 copies 1 for local development and 1 for deployment and to strip out all your comments and formatting before you go live. "No reason to make a code stealer's job easier right?" as he would say.

Personally though I sorta take pride in my clean, human readable, and hand written code (Notepad++ FTW!) and the comments I leave for myself. Is this a good habit or maybe a useless display?

I just leave my CSS as is really.. I leave comments in to remind me of ending segments in the source code and little reminders in the external style sheets if need be. I, like you, take pride in my human readable code :D

http://www.cssdrive.com/index.php/main/csscompressor/ allows you to compress your CSS code. My compression results are ok I guess... Here are my results from my style sheet:

Compression results

Original size: 8580 bytes
Compressed size: 6005 bytes
Savings: 2575 bytes (30%)

When you put a site "live" do you compress your CSS code? Is the space saved and performance gained really that significant?

I know my professor always said to maintain 2 copies 1 for local development and 1 for deployment and to strip out all your comments and formatting before you go live. "No reason to make a code stealer's job easier right?" as he would say.

Personally though I sorta take pride in my clean, human readable, and hand written code (Notepad++ FTW!) and the comments I leave for myself. Is this a good habit or maybe a useless display?

For most sites I leave them in. But some CMS like drupal have automatic compression built in so I don't have to worry about it.

same me, I also leave CSS same as original.

The automatic compression with drupal is very handy :)

no need to compress because it's cached then called upon repeatedly in the users temp internet folder

much more important for mobile sites I would say, where it can take 10 - 20 seconds for a page to load on your phone. maybe you could shave an entire second off.