Does white space hurt

[squidsk]

Originally Posted by GaryT

I've noticed in the code (any vb code) there are sometimes spaces between lines of code. Does that have any adverse effect on load time?

Is there a reason for what I call white space?

Would it hurt anything if I closed up all the code so there was no "white space"?

White space in php has no bearing on load time, due to the fact that the php is run server side and ignores whitespace. Long story short there's no benefit to removing whitespace from php but there is a downside, which is that if you ever need to find something in the code it becomes significantly more difficult to do so since it is no longer readable.

As an aside, javascript and css there's a benefit to having minimal whitespace, which is why vbulletin css (and js I believe) by default comes minified because it saves you bandwidth to send a file with minimal size.