Painfully Obvious.

Comments

1. Adam van den Hoven Oct 30th, 2006 at 11:45 am

   Andrew,

   I’ve got a quick question about your tools. Specifically, have you validated that they don’t do anything to important to the code they modify. For example. I took the prototype code from one of the latest releases of script.aculo.us (which weighs in at 64kb) and ran it through your compression routine (44kb) and your minimize routine (48kb) both of which seems reasonable. I then minimized the copressed file and got down to an absurd 8kb. Since I’m not too familiar with prototype, I’m not sure if/how I can run tests to ensure its still working correctly. An 8-fold decrease in file size just seems too good to be true.

   Adam

2. Andrew Oct 30th, 2006 at 2:30 pm

   Adam, they’re not really my tools — one of them is Dojo’s compressor and the other is Douglas Crockford’s. An eightfold compression yield does sound a little fishy, so I’d make sure the file still works by running it through the Prototype unit tests (which you can get by checking out the bleeding-edge copy from Subversion).

   My results for compressing and minimizing prototype.js were identical to yours, but I never thought to do both on a single instance of the file.