The only thing with 'just gzip it' is that actually minification+gzip does seem to give slightly better results than just gzipping it. This is partly going to be because there are some things that gzip doesn't know it can remove that a minifier does - e.g. comments. Presumably this difference is exacerbated if your codebase uses long/descriptive names and many long comments. Not that this is a particular problem for Python on the web of course because minifiers do exist for it.