Brion Vibber wrote:
The big downside of minification, of course, is that it makes it harder to read and debug the code.
Debugging is needed by what, 0.01% of all users? I think that using &minify=0 suggestion when debugging is a very good solution. But Tim said that isn't going to happen...
CSS/JS generated via MediaWiki are gzipped. Those loaded from raw files are not, as the servers aren't currently configured to do that.
Talking about gzipping, something a little off-topic: Currently, the parsed output in the object cache is gzipped, and MediaWiki has to unzip it, insert it into the Monobook skin, then gzip again (in PHP zlib output compression). Did you consider taking a shortcut, and sending the compressed parser output directly from the cache to the client, compressing only the surroundings created by the skin?
- Stick a version number on the URL in a query string (probably easy --
grab the timestamp from the image metadata and toss it on the url?)
I think it is better to have a fragment (like, the first 32-bits) of the SHA1, so that rollbacks preserve the already-cached versions.