Minification

What Does Minification Mean?

Minification is a computer science term for changing code to remove unnecessary characters and elements. By taking out comments and extraneous characters, as well as phrases and elements of a codebase, minification makes files smaller. It is a general best practice in many kinds of coding and codebase handling.

Advertisements

Minification is also known as minimization.

Techopedia Explains Minification

Some people tend to think of minification as a type of compression, but there are critical differences. Minification is a compression in a technical sense, because compression takes an entire file and condenses it according to various technical operations to condense and truncate file size. By contrast, minification involves taking out white space and comments and other non-mission-critical elements in order to shorten the code itself. However, both minification and compression can help to whittle down the size of an executable file.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Latest Software Development Terms

Related Reading

Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…