On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 11:18 PM, Daniel Friesen dan_the_man@telus.net wrote:
Minification being pointless when gzipped is actually logical to understand if you know their principles. Both gzipping and minification follow the same principle. They take sequences that are repeated, create an optimized tree, and then store smaller sequences that refer to the data in that tree. Once something has been optimized like that, it's almost impossible to get it any smaller because you've already removed the repeat sequences of data. Basically trying to minify then gzip, is like trying to gzip twice, it can't technically give you much more.
Sure it can, because minification is lossy, and knows the syntax of JavaScript. gzipping cannot know that most runs of whitespace characters and all comments are unnecessary for execution and can be stripped entirely.
Although you're right that minify=0 would not solve everything. For instance, if the error console gives an error as occurring on a specific line, that won't be helpful if you check the unminified version, and might be unhelpful if you check the minified version too (if everything is crammed onto a few lines).
I think the best way forward is to 1) concatenate all the JS/CSS files into one using a PHP script; 2) add a configurable minification option, set to false by default; and only then 3) experiment with how much faster/more inconvenient it would actually be to use minification on Wikipedia.