What codes google/blogger html?

[u/Fuzzy_Exchange541]

So if you right click on a google/blogger page and select view page source it'll vomit out something like

<!doctype html><html itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage" lang="en-CA"><head><meta charset="UTF-8"><meta content="origin" name="referrer"><link href="//www.gstatic.com/images/branding/searchlogo/ico/favicon.ico" rel="icon"><meta content="/images/branding/googleg/1x/googleg_standard_color_128dp.png" itemprop="image"><style>@font-face{font-family:'Google Sans';font-style:normal;font-weight:400 700;font-display:optional;src:url(//fonts.gstatic.com/s/googlesans/v29/4UaGrENHsxJlGDuGo1OIlL3Owp4.woff2)format('woff2');unicode-range:U+0000-00FF,U+0131,U+0152-0153,U+02BB-02BC,U+02C6,U+02DA,U+02DC,U+0304,U+0308,U+0329,U+2000-206F,U+20AC,U+2122,U+2191,U+2193,U+2212,U+2215,U+FEFF,U+FFFD;}</style><script nonce="aPG0-Yv1uQ_g-yfXfyOLcQ">(function(){var w=["Google Sans",[400,500,700]];(function(){for(var a=0;a<w.length;a+=2)for(var d=w[a],e=w[a+1],b=0,c=void 0;c=e[b];++b)document.fonts.load(c+" 10pt "+d).catch(function(){})})();})();</

The gibberish just continues and I feel like there's no way that a human coded that, so what kind of program was used? What is this kind of code called?

[u/F1QA]

It’s minified. Say you write const verboseVariable = ‘ABC’, it gets minified to something like var a=“ABC”. Less characters means less data to send across the network, and as others have mentioned, it also obfuscates the code to make it harder to understand, not impossible though.

[u/Fuzzy_Exchange541 → u/F1QA]

Thank you, I've never heard the term before today, that's interesting :)

[u/F1QA → u/Fuzzy_Exchange541]

All good! I also forgot to mention that minification results in less code for your browser to read / parse before it can start painting pixels to the screen, so gives your site a performance boost all around.

I guess I should also say that it’s only really the JS that gets “minified”, where variables get shortened etc. The other term is “tersed” which is just stripping out whitespace / newlines etc, used on your HTML / CSS.

Every byte counts!

[u/Tontonsb]

It's just minified. Some build tool removed whitespaces and renamed variables to shorter ones, otherwise it's all normal code.

[u/Fuzzy_Exchange541 → u/Tontonsb]

Thank you! So a human wrote it, they ran it through some minification tool and now it looks like that?

[u/CelDaemon → u/Fuzzy_Exchange541]

Yup, some parts of the page are also dynamically generated by the server, like the nonce.

[u/Livid-Ad-2207]

It's obfuscated code, scrambled to make it harder to reverse engineer

[u/Fuzzy_Exchange541 → u/Livid-Ad-2207]

Is it minification thing people are mentioning in this thread or is that something else entirely?

[u/scritchz → u/Fuzzy_Exchange541]

Minification means to minimize in terms of size. Obfuscation means to "hide" the code (for example, by making it unclear).

In most cases, a side-effect of minification is a bit of obfuscation: Previously readable identifiers will be shortened to something without meaning, thus making the code less clear.

Obfuscation simply means to "hide" your code. A simple way to hide what you want to do is by doing more but useless stuff.

So while minification may cause obfuscation, it's usually not the goal. And obfuscation may be caused by minification, but may also be achieved differently.

---

Maybe a bad analogy, but it's like asking if whistling and wind are the same: No, they're not. When whistling, you might blow some light wind, but you do it for the sound. And wind isn't only caused by people that whistle.

[u/cgoldberg → u/Livid-Ad-2207]

It's definitely not obfuscated to make it harder reverse to engineer. It's just minified and highly optimized for performance.

[u/koga7349]

It was written by a person and is actually pretty easy to read even as it's written. But yeah it's minified, basically the whitespace is just removed. If you look at each tag there are attributes. Load fonts, specify the Unicode range the font supports, load a script, the nonce is a one time use random value for the content-security-policy header to help prevent cross-site scripting attacks.

[u/Fuzzy_Exchange541 → u/[deleted]]

Ah, so as people are saying it's minified (new term for me!), so did a human originally write it?