Author
Nicholas C. Zakas
Nicholas C. Zakas (@slicknet) is the principal front-end engineer for the Yahoo! homepage and a contributor to the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library. He wrote the Cookie Utility, Profiler, and YUI Test. He is the author of two books, Professional JavaScript for Web Developers and High Performance JavaScript, a co-author on Professional Ajax, and a contributor to Even Faster Web Sites. Nicholas writes regularly at his blog about web development.
Also from this author
Variable naming can be a source of coding angst for humans trying to understand code. Once you're sure that a human doesn't need to interpret your JavaScript code, variables simply become generic placeholders for values. Nicholas C. Zakas shows us how to further minify JavaScript by replacing local variable names with the YUI Compressor.
Like CSS, JavaScript works best and hardest when stored in an external file that can be downloaded and cached separately from our site's individual HTML pages. To increase performance, we limit the number of external requests and make our JavaScript as small as possible. JavaScript minification schemes began with JSMin in 2004 and progressed to the YUI Compressor in 2007. Now the inventor of Extreme JavaScript Compression with YUI Compressor reveals coding patterns that interfere with compression, and techniques to modify or avoid these coding patterns so as to improve the YUI Compressor's performance. Think small and live large.
