Why are the HTML classes of some major, complex sites written as seemingly meaningless strings of letters?

Question

For example, I was just inspecting a page of Google's and saw a class written as Yj Fg Ws IY fW Zf. Is that to confound anybody who might want to understand how Google does what it does? If you're a developer for Google, how are you supposed to remember that, especially among all your other classes? Or what about anybody else who needs to make changes to that code in the future?

Is there a benefit to coding it this way?

Answer 1

In order to make the pages smaller, and thus faster to send to users, most major sites minify the files, especially the javascript and css files. This operation usually

• concatenates files to reduce the number of requests
• removes comments
• removes useless spaces and CR
• changes long variable names to shorter ones

One of the tools for doing this operation is provided by Google : The Closure compiler. This is something easy to do and there is no reason to ignore it as soon as you start paying attention to the display speed or to your bandwidth.

Some developers might use it in order to protect a little their source codes but that's not the most usual reason.