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The ability to figure out how a piece of code works is different than being able to take that code and reuse it elsewhere. View source is important both for th

The ability to figure out how a piece of code works is different than being able to take that code and reuse it elsewhere. View source is important both for the sake of debugging in the case of 3rd party javascript, and also for the sake of being able to teach others. Regardless of the minification issue, it's possible to use a code formatter to expand a minified file and at least identify where declarations are being made and what functional behavior is being specified. Minification makes viewing source inconvenient, but that's not equivalent with closed.

moe 14y ago
it's possible to use a code formatter to expand a minified file If you go to that length you can just as well use a decompiler, no difference.
- beagle3 14y ago
  Huge difference. Minified files, more often than not, have the original identifiers, original code structure (e.g. you know a for from a while ). With a decompiler, you lose all of that. Google closure is a compiler (and thus loses a lot of this data), but most minifiers are not semantically destructive.
  - moe 14y ago
    Many other minifiers also munge the symbols (e.g. YUI compressor). And why should this process retain anything anyways? If you want your source-code available for download then... put up a download link.
    - beagle3 14y ago
      > And why should this process retain anything anyways? Because javascript has some reflection, and also because of weird scoping rules (with, eval, etc.) you can never be sure where a symbol comes from unless you have access to the exact version of every other script on the page, e.g. jquery, etc) > If you want your source-code available for download then... put up a download link. I agree - but there is still a huge difference between deminified and decompiled source readbility - which is all I was saying.
pka 14y ago
js minifiers not only remove whitespace, they reorder execution paths, eliminate useless declarations, identify unreachable code [1]. Reformatting a minified js file is not going to produce a much better result than disassembling a distributed binary file would. [1] https://developers.google.com/closure https://developers.google.com/closure
- beagle3 14y ago
  Google's closure is a compiler, not a minifier (the distinction being: if it does semantic analysis it is a compiler; although I've never seen a minifier that does even real syntactic analysis -- they all do lexical)

moe 14y ago

it's possible to use a code formatter to expand a minified file If you go to that length you can just as well use a decompiler, no difference.

beagle3 14y ago
Huge difference. Minified files, more often than not, have the original identifiers, original code structure (e.g. you know a for from a while ). With a decompiler, you lose all of that. Google closure is a compiler (and thus loses a lot of this data), but most minifiers are not semantically destructive.
- moe 14y ago
  Many other minifiers also munge the symbols (e.g. YUI compressor). And why should this process retain anything anyways? If you want your source-code available for download then... put up a download link.
  - beagle3 14y ago
    > And why should this process retain anything anyways? Because javascript has some reflection, and also because of weird scoping rules (with, eval, etc.) you can never be sure where a symbol comes from unless you have access to the exact version of every other script on the page, e.g. jquery, etc) > If you want your source-code available for download then... put up a download link. I agree - but there is still a huge difference between deminified and decompiled source readbility - which is all I was saying.

pka 14y ago

js minifiers not only remove whitespace, they reorder execution paths, eliminate useless declarations, identify unreachable code [1]. Reformatting a minified js file is not going to produce a much better result than disassembling a distributed binary file would. [1] https://developers.google.com/closure https://developers.google.com/closure

beagle3 14y ago
Google's closure is a compiler, not a minifier (the distinction being: if it does semantic analysis it is a compiler; although I've never seen a minifier that does even real syntactic analysis -- they all do lexical)