>our minified HTML
Unreadable source code is a crime against humanity.
Unreadable source code is a crime against humanity.
If we wanted browsers to be fed code that for performance reasons isn't human-readable, web servers ought to serve something that's processed way more than just gzipped minification. It could be more like bytecode.
About the byte code: You mean wasm? (Guess that's what you're alluding to.)
Isn’t this essential what WebAssembly is doing? I’ll admit I haven’t looked into it much, as I’m crap with C/++, though I’d like to try Rust. Having “near native” performance in a browser sounds nice, curious to see how far it’s come.
Worth keeping in mind that "performance" here refers to saving bandwidth costs as the host. Every single unnecessary whitespace or character is a byte that didn't need to be uploaded, hence minify and save on that bandwidth and thus $$$$.
The performance difference on the browser end between original and minified source code is negligible.
What really adds to the source code footprint is all of those trackers, adverts and, in a lot of cases, framework overhead.
I'm actually all for binary HTML – not just it's smaller, it can also be easier to parse, and makes more sense overall nowadays.
For me I guess what I was getting at is that I consider source the stuff I'm working on - the minified output I won't touch, it's output. But it is input for someone else, and available as a View Source so that does muddy the waters, just like decompilers produce "source" that no sane human would want to work on.
I think semantically I would consider the original source code the "real" source if that makes sense. The source is wherever it all comes from. The rest is various types of output from further down the toolchain tree. I don't know if the official definition agrees with that though.
Plus I suspect minifying HTML or JS is often cargo cult (for small sites who are frying the wrong fish) or compensating for page bloat
You can always open dev tools in your browser and have an interactive, nicely formatted HTML tree there with a ton of inspection and manipulation features.
If you dislike unreadable source code I would assume you would object to minifying JS, in which case you should ask people to include sourcemaps instead of objecting to minification.
Not to mention, there is no need to "minify" HTML, CSS, or JavaShit for a browser to render a page unlike compiled code which is more or less a necessity for such things.
> The program must include source code [...] The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor [...] are not allowed.
By your logic, there's actually no reason to use compiled code at all, for almost anything above the kernel. We can just use Python to do everything, including run browsers, play video games, etc. Sure, it'll be dog-slow, but you seem to care more about reading the code than performance or any other consideration.
Glad to see the diversity of HN readers apparently includes twelve year olds.
Anyway, you do realise plenty of languages have compilers with JS as a compilation target, right? How readable do you think that is?
The abuse of JavaScript does not deserve the respect of being called by a proper name.
>Anyway, you do realise plenty of languages have compilers with JS as a compilation target, right? How readable do you think that is?
If you're going to run "compiled" code through an interpreter anyway, is that really compiled code?