Remove unmaintained plugins: middleman-minify-html and middleman-favicon-maker

[ikuwow]

Two Middleman plugins used in this repo are effectively unmaintained and should be removed. Verified via GitHub API as of 2026-07-06.

Current state

• middleman-minify-html: no commits since 2020-08 (last commit: "Support middleman v5" merge). Activated in config.rb build block.
• middleman-favicon-maker (follmann/middleman-favicon-maker): last commit on master 2017-11. Activated in config.rb build block. Requires imagemagick installed in CI (.circleci/config.yml build job has a dedicated apt-get install step).

Both are not archived on GitHub, but have had zero maintenance activity for 5+ years while the rest of the Middleman ecosystem (middleman, middleman-blog, middleman-syntax) still receives Ruby compatibility updates.

Proposed work

• Remove both gems from Gemfile
• Remove activate :minify_html and the activate :favicon_maker block from config.rb
• Generate the favicon / apple-touch-icon files once and commit them as static assets under source/
• Remove the imagemagick install step from .circleci/config.yml
• Verify build output diff: only HTML whitespace differences (minify loss) and identical favicon files expected

Notes

• HTML minify loss is assumed acceptable: CSS minify remains via minify_css, and compression is handled at the CDN layer. Revisit this assumption here before starting the work.
• This reduces the unmaintained-dependency surface without leaving Middleman (see Deprecate Middleman #559 for the broader migration discussion).