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.

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.

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Margaret Rouse

Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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