If you are a web developer designing a large website, you would want to optimize it on many fronts. Most importantly, your design must incorporate fast response times. This includes reducing the size of response for a particular request, and keeping the number of server requests, for getting a particular job done, to the minimum. This way, you are not just using the bandwidth optimally, but also making the user experience considerably quicker and smoother.
As a modern web developer, you are sure to use a lot of JavaScript and CSS along with raw HTML for rendering and enabling a rich interaction with clients. You can achieve the above mentioned optimizations by using a technique called minifying of your CSS and JavaScript files, which leads to the minimizing of both response size and the number of server requests. To understand this better, let’s delve a little deeper into the issue.
WHY EXACTLY IS MINIFYING REQUIRED?
As opposed to compiled languages where the end result of a code is machine code, client side web response consists of interpreted scripts written using JavaScript, where the text code itself is transmitted. While developing a site you are apt to code in a way that is easily readable, using spaces, newlines and long variable names wherever required. Moreover, in order to maintain modularity in the code you may want to separate the code into the design part, the scripting part and the styling part as different files. You will be implementing this in your web page by using the
