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copied!<p>There is always a point in minifying, combining and gzipping your assets, to ease server load.</p> <ul> <li>Minifying is the act you refer to, of stripping away unnecessary whitespace and comments, to make the download speed smaller.</li> <li>Combining will most likely show an even greater increase in page rendering speed; it is the act of merging all your javascript files into one, and all your css files into one (it can also be done for most images, but that taks requires some more work). This is done to reduce the amount of requests the browser has to make towards your server, to be able to display the page.</li> <li>GZipping is the act of further compressing the data, in a zipped format, to the browsers that indicate that they'll accept such data. This further reduces size, but adds some extra work load at both ends. You're likely to see a net gain from it.</li> </ul> <p>Depending on what environment you're working in, there are different components that'll help you with this, that usually covers all of the above in one go.</p> <p>The time your code takes to download from the server has a direct effect on how long the page takes to render. JavaScript is blocking, meaning that a JS block will prevent any furhter rendering, until the block has executed entirely. As such, where you put your javascript files (i.e. in which point in the rendering process they'll be requested), how many requests it takes for it to be completely downloaded, and how much data there is to download, will have an impact on your page load, as it appears to the user.</p> <p>Once the browser has parsed your code, be it javascript, css or html, it'll have created internal representations of the part it needs to keep remembering, and the actual formatting will no longer affect it.</p>

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