Tim Starling wrote:
> On 07/09/10 17:44, Roan Kattouw wrote:
>
>> 2010/9/7 Dmitriy Sintsov <ques...@rambler.ru>:
>>
>>> Do browsers support streamed and combined (archive-like) gz-encoded
>>> content? Then probably minifying will not be neccessary.
>>>
>> Minification makes a shocking difference: remember that it's not just
>> whitespace being stripped, it's comments as well. For example, in
>> /trunk/extensions/UsabilityInitiative/js we have:
>>
>> plugins.combined.js: 259281 bytes
>> plugins.combined.min.js: 142565 bytes
>> plugins.combined.js.gz: 65569 bytes
>> plugins.combined.min.js.gz: 32740 bytes
>>
>> So not only is the minified JS roughly half the size in both the
>> compressed and the uncompressed cases, it actually /compresses better/
>> (3.95x vs. 4.35x).
>>
>
> Note that the advantage of minification is somewhat inflated due to
> the nature of the source. There seems to be a "because we can" element
> to it: because the developers are so impressed by the concept of
> minification, they write excessively verbose and excessively many
> comments. For example:
>
> // create the span wrapper for the matched text
> var spannode = document.createElement( 'span' );
> spannode.className = 'highlight';
> // shave off the characters preceding the matched text
> var middlebit = node.splitText( pos );
> // shave off any unmatched text off the end
> middlebit.splitText( pat.length );
> // clone for appending to our span
> var middleclone = middlebit.cloneNode( true );
> // append the matched text node to the span
> spannode.appendChild( middleclone );
> // replace the matched node, with our span-wrapped clone of the
> matched node
> middlebit.parentNode.replaceChild( spannode, middlebit );
>
> Or a doc comment:
>
> /**
> * This plugin provides a generic way to add suggestions to a text box.
> *
> * Usage:
> *
> * Set options:
> * $('#textbox').suggestions( { option1: value1, option2: value2 }
> );
> * $('#textbox').suggestions( option, value );
> * Get option:
> * value = $('#textbox').suggestions( option );
> * Initialize:
> * $('#textbox').suggestions();
> *
> * Options:
> *
> * fetch(query): Callback that should fetch suggestions and set the
> suggestions property. Executed in the context of the
> * textbox
> * Type: Function
> * cancel: Callback function to call when any pending asynchronous
> suggestions fetches should be canceled.
> * Executed in the context of the textbox
> * Type: Function
> * special: Set of callbacks for rendering and selecting
> * Type: Object of Functions 'render' and 'select'
> * result: Set of callbacks for rendering and selecting
> * Type: Object of Functions 'render' and 'select'
> * $region: jQuery selection of element to place the suggestions below
> and match width of
> * Type: jQuery Object, Default: $(this)
> * suggestions: Suggestions to display
> * Type: Array of strings
> * maxRows: Maximum number of suggestions to display at one time
> * Type: Number, Range: 1 - 100, Default: 7
> * delay: Number of ms to wait for the user to stop typing
> * Type: Number, Range: 0 - 1200, Default: 120
> * submitOnClick: Whether to submit the form containing the textbox
> when a suggestion is clicked
> * Type: Boolean, Default: false
> * maxExpandFactor: Maximum suggestions box width relative to the
> textbox width. If set to e.g. 2, the suggestions box
> * will never be grown beyond 2 times the width of the textbox.
> * Type: Number, Range: 1 - infinity, Default: 3
> * positionFromLeft: Whether to position the suggestion box with the
> left attribute or the right
> * Type: Boolean, Default: true
> * highlightInput: Whether to hightlight matched portions of the input
> or not
> * Type: Boolean, Default: false
> */
>
> I think it's ironic that this style arises in JavaScript, given that
> it's a high-level language and relatively easy to understand, and that
> you could make a technical case in favour of terseness. C has an
> equally effective minification technique known as compilation, and its
> practitioners tend to be terse to a fault. For instance, many Linux
> kernel modules have no comments at all, except for the license header.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
This brings up a question, what's the comparison between unminified,
minified, just stripping comments, and their gzipped versions?
Does minified+gzipped provide any significant size savings over simple
commentstripped+gzipped?
If not, then there's something to say about that since only erasing
comments would still make debugging somewhat doable since you should be
able to get a good enough line number to use find with some nearby code
to track down where the bug is. (You also won't run into server-side js
syntax-error issues due to needing to minify actual code)
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
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