What is "minification"

n. 1 The reduction in apparent size of objects viewed through a lens or mirror shaped so as to increase the field of view, such as a convex or aspheric mirror or a Fresnel lens 2 (context computing English) The removal of white space and unnecessary characters from a web page's source code in order to reduce its size and improve download time

Minification may refer to:

• Magnification, by a factor of less than one, producing a smaller image
• Minification (programming), a software coding technique
• Minimisation (psychology), a form of cognitive distortion

Minification (also minimisation or minimization), in computer programming languages and especially JavaScript, is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code without changing its functionality. These unnecessary characters usually include white space characters, new line characters, comments, and sometimes block delimiters, which are used to add readability to the code but are not required for it to execute.

Minified source code is especially useful for interpreted languages deployed and transmitted on the Internet (such as JavaScript), because it reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred. Minified source code may also be used as a kind of obfuscation, though the term obfuscation may be distinguished as a form of false cryptography while a minified code instance may be reversed using a pretty-printer. In programmer culture, aiming at extremely minified source code is the purpose of recreational code golf competitions.

Minification can be distinguished from the more general concept of data compression in that the minified source can be interpreted immediately without the need for an uncompression step: the same interpreter can work with both the original as well as with the minified source.