Minification
In plain terms
Shrinking code by removing unnecessary characters.
Going deeper
Minification strips whitespace, comments, and shortens names to reduce file size without changing behavior, speeding downloads. It's a build-time optimization.
Under the hood
Often paired with compression (gzip/brotli) and bundling; source maps restore readability for debugging.
Examples
Production JS/CSS, faster page loads, Terser, build pipelines.
Think of it like...
Like compressing a verbose letter into shorthand that still says the same thing.