Who discovered that minifying code takes less bandwidth?

Yeah since the 90s...

Uh mm..maths?

Uhm, the person who came up with it?

@ChappIO this is 10/10 answer right here boys and girls

@tisaconundrum haha sorry for my sarcasm. But what I meant is that no one discovered it. The goal was to minimize bandwidth (or storage) so they minimized code.

That concept was started by Douglas Crockford when he released JSMin to remove comments and such from sources before pushing to production.

@ChappIO huh, so it was done out of desperation really.

@tisaconundrum pretty much. People have always been looking at ways to improve user experience abs before all the fiberglass connections and stuff load times were the biggest issue.

Comments are useless to a browser so it makes sense not to send them over the Internet.

@ChappIO

In 2003 Douglas Crockford introduced tool JSMin, which only removed comments and whitespace. It was followed by YUI Compressor shortly thereafter. In 2009, Google opened up its Closure toolkit, including Closure Compiler which contained a source mapping feature together with a Firefox extension called Closure Inspector. In 2010, Mihai Bazon introduced UglifyJS, which was superseded by UglifyJS2 in 2012; the rewrite was to allow for source map support.

source: Wikipedia

Oh... it does? I thought it just made the code easier to read or something...