[Koha-devel] combining and minification of javascript and css

[Paul]

At 08:36 PM 4/7/2012 -0400, Chris Nighswonger wrote:
>On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 6:02 PM, Dobrica Pavlinusic <dpavlin at rot13.org> wrote:
>I would like to address this one as part of performance work.
>[snip]
>Minification alone doesn't buy us much:
>
>OPAC search:
>minify js 334974 -> 311553 93.01%
>minify css 148277 -> 133128 89.78%
>
>intranet search:
>minify js 382102 -> 362172 94.78%
>minify css 134754 -> 123771 91.85%
>
>But combining JS and CSS files together saves us round-trips to server:
>
>OPAC 32 -> 20 requests
>intranet 27 -> 13 requests

Has anyone tried using "page speed v1.12" (the google add-on to bugzilla) 
which although designed for chrome will work with firefox?  Google seem to 
be quite keen on the 'minify' principle (see 
<http://code.google.com/p/minify/>.)

It has started pushing me towards looking at various combinations of 
'minify' (in itself not a great saver, as stated above, as it seems just to 
remove white space and comments then unify logic on a single line basis), 
'combination' (which might have limits with the variety of somewhat older 
browsers) and x-cache which has advantages, but only in a stable 
environment -- try changing a favicon ;={

First thoughts from my end seem to point towards combining (css files 
separately from js at this point in time) into what's needed to display the 
page ("instant gui gratification") and what can be slightly delayed ("page 
functions") and getting the download server==>client in the correct order.

Best - Paul