Hey Joe, I’m glad you can feel comfortable voicing your concerns here. Looking through the issues on that repository, I can see why there’s a bit of controversy. I don’t think it’s a bad discussion to have.
since the HTML spec describes the and tags as “optional”, he thinks that means they should be deleted.
Well, that is the definition of minification. What you’re probably bumping up against most of the time are clients that are not spec-compliant. In the case of removing a tag that has useful attributes, though, maybe that’s an issue to open with the repo as a bug report.
Let’s be sure to make a clear distinction between the minify plugin and the underlying minification library; they are written and maintained by different people! It could be that the behavior you’re seeking is possible with the underlying library you’ve linked to, but maybe its options aren’t exposed through the plugin. In that case, definitely file an issue with in the minify plugin’s repo.