4 ms·

He says in his article that minification is best practice. And I imagine I'm a dinosaur and (or) completely out of touch, because I disagree. Minifcation becom

He says in his article that minification is best practice. And I imagine I'm a dinosaur and (or) completely out of touch, because I disagree. Minifcation becomes a thing when the page is too big. And many pages* contain bloat that do nothing to improve my lot. I write my CSS by hand, and keep it as sparse as I can. When I do use JavaScript it does a specific thing, like filter a dataset or move a slider. And it's easy to debug because it's pithy, and uses sensible naming. * Some pages - specifically real-time apps - need lots of JS bloat. I get and accept that. Happily I don't need to make any of those beasts.

Klathmon 9y ago
You are making a mistake thinking this technology is for your use case. Just because you use JavaScript in your websites doesn't mean that you are making a "web app". Your 1kb JS file might not need minification, but my 1.2MB app that minifies down to 200KB does. They are not the same any more than a 6 line python script is the same as Django
joekrill 9y ago
In pretty much every case minification is going to reduce the payload, which is going to reduce the amount of data a client has to download. Whether you're minifying 1KB down to 100 bytes, or 50 MB down to 3 MB -- you're still benefiting. I can't really see a case where that is a bad thing, particularly when you have source maps to get you back to the original source code, anyway. Your stance just seems very naive.
- Spearchucker 9y ago
  Source maps have never worked out for me, and my pages are tiny (I see no benefit in sacrificing readability for a reduction from 1K to 100 bytes).
  - rimliu 9y ago
    That's an interesting claim about readability. You may as well argue that compilation of C program reduces its readability. Minification should be a step of making a production build. It does not affect source code and thus it does not affect readability.
    - lmm 9y ago
      > You may as well argue that compilation of C program reduces its readability. Minification should be a step of making a production build. You can't run C without building it, so you have to do some kind of compilation. I've certainly known people to argue for e.g. including debug symbols even in the build you ship to customers - the savings from stripping them aren't worth the added complexity and difficulty of debugging.
- romaniv 9y ago
  Smaller files are never a bad thing in themselves, but increasingly complex toolchains have a maintenance cost that people don't seem to notice. And I'm not just talking about making them work. I'm talking about everything, including choosing, learning, upgrading, replacing, dealing with problems people talk about here and even reading this article. I'm not sure how we got to the point where something that worked without minification on year 2000 networks no longer works without per-processing on year 2017 networks.

Klathmon 9y ago

You are making a mistake thinking this technology is for your use case. Just because you use JavaScript in your websites doesn't mean that you are making a "web app". Your 1kb JS file might not need minification, but my 1.2MB app that minifies down to 200KB does. They are not the same any more than a 6 line python script is the same as Django

joekrill 9y ago

In pretty much every case minification is going to reduce the payload, which is going to reduce the amount of data a client has to download. Whether you're minifying 1KB down to 100 bytes, or 50 MB down to 3 MB -- you're still benefiting. I can't really see a case where that is a bad thing, particularly when you have source maps to get you back to the original source code, anyway. Your stance just seems very naive.

Spearchucker 9y ago
Source maps have never worked out for me, and my pages are tiny (I see no benefit in sacrificing readability for a reduction from 1K to 100 bytes).
- rimliu 9y ago
  That's an interesting claim about readability. You may as well argue that compilation of C program reduces its readability. Minification should be a step of making a production build. It does not affect source code and thus it does not affect readability.
  - lmm 9y ago
    > You may as well argue that compilation of C program reduces its readability. Minification should be a step of making a production build. You can't run C without building it, so you have to do some kind of compilation. I've certainly known people to argue for e.g. including debug symbols even in the build you ship to customers - the savings from stripping them aren't worth the added complexity and difficulty of debugging.
romaniv 9y ago
Smaller files are never a bad thing in themselves, but increasingly complex toolchains have a maintenance cost that people don't seem to notice. And I'm not just talking about making them work. I'm talking about everything, including choosing, learning, upgrading, replacing, dealing with problems people talk about here and even reading this article. I'm not sure how we got to the point where something that worked without minification on year 2000 networks no longer works without per-processing on year 2017 networks.