Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site recommends minimizing the number of HTTP requests during the delivery of a webpage because there is a significant amount of overhead during the HTTP request process for each file. Furthermore, CSS and Javascript file sizes can be “minified” by removing unnecessary characters, white space, comments, etc. The downside to combining files and minifying, though, is that it becomes very difficult to debug or maintain minified code. To get the best of both worlds, it is best practice to keep two copies of each file — a combined/minified version (for deployment) and a non-combined, readable version (for development). While this process would be labor-intensive with each build, we can implement a few simple tricks in Visual Studio to automate this process and achieve a faster end-user experience.
©2012 Sean P. Kane, PharmD, BCPS.
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