At 11:46 -0400 3/23/09, Brian Mearns wrote, and I snipped a bit:
As long as we're on this topic, I'd like to step up on my soap box for a minute and beseech my fellow web developers to use minification thoughtfully. Reducing network traffic and speeding up load time is definitely a worthwhile goal, but we should always bear in mind that the web should be an open place to exchange ideas and techniques. Few things about web developing are more frustrating than seeing something cool on a person's page, and viewing the source only to find it's been minified to the point of obfuscation. If there are legitimate security concerns, then obviously that's a separate matter, but if the purpose is just minification, I think it'd be a real nice touch to precede the minified content with a brief comment indicating the URL for the original (unminified) source. Okay, I'll stop preaching now.
From another point of view I am really frustrated by the way my banks and brokers use JavaScript in their login schemes. It appears that the goal is security through obfuscation which is never a good idea.
I like to automate downloads of bank balances and security positions in the early morning with a cron job. I typically use curl to access the site using my perfectly legal login name and password. With the likes of a perl script calling curl its usually easy to implement.
But when the programmers use JavaScript to create cookies that are modified in code before referring to an external - to them - site for some kind of pulse checking it does get to be a PITA. If I couldn't read their JavaScript I would be hard pressed to emulate what a browser does.
And programmers who use JavaScript to check each letter as it is typed in a way that makes it impossible even with a browser to copy and paste login information are enough to make me change brokers.
Minified for 2400 baud connections, perhaps. Make it optional but don't make my scripts even harder to prepare.
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