2010/9/7 Dmitriy Sintsov questpc@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).
Also, it would be great if these high-level JS-libraries like jQuery actually were ported into DOM API level (native browser's implementation instead of extra JS layer). However, these questions are to FF/IE/Opera developers...
I definitely think this is the future, provided it's implemented reliably cross-browser. Also, you'd probably want to have a fallback library for browsers that have no or incomplete (e.g. missing a jQuery feature that's newer than the browser) native support.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)