> The idea of building/compiling in web development is (and has always been) totally alien. HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
Then you may be serving your users broken implementations or you may be spending way too much time handling progressive enhancement. If not, congratulations on mastering every edge case.
The rest of us use polyfills, linting, transpilation, treeshaking, and other alien tool chains to help us out.
The last 12 years of browser development (and the people who make said tools, so things get adopted quicker) are to thank for letting you do more things with less tools today.
Also minifying code seems like a no brainer for someone developing a web app.
Is it?
Bootstrap CSS: 147KB
Bootstrap CSS Minified: 122KB
Bootstrap CSS GZipped: 22KB
Bootstrap CSS GZipped and Minified: 20KB
I'm not convinved 10% is worth adding a minifier. And I ask this question for every build tool in my projects.
source: https://css-tricks.com/the-difference-between-minification-a...
CSS minifies quite poorly compared to JavaScript. JavaScript generally minifies quite well (I've seen savings as high as 85%). The minifier can mangle variable and function names as much as it wants with no effect on behavior as well as do automatic dead code elimination and constant expression evaluation. CSS does not compress nearly as easily because the minifier is much more limited in what it can compress (mostly formatting).