[theme-reviewers] Minified CSS

[Otto]

On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 10:24 AM, Austin Matzko <austin at pressedcode.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 9:19 AM, Otto <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:
>> Folks, seriously? This is not a GPL issue.
>>
>> Even minified CSS is still CSS, and it's not rendered uneditable by
>> minification. Use any CSS Beautifier and voila, it'll add the
>> whitespace right back for you.
>
> And I can un-obscure JS <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/15262>
> and even decompile a binary file.

Reversing JS compression and decompiling don't give you the original
code back. Beautifying CSS does, because CSS cannot have its actual
content altered or it loses its meaning.

Whitespace is not part of code. Removing it doesn't alter the code.
Adding it back doesn't alter the code. You cannot "compress" CSS in
any other fashion except by removing whitespace and/or comments.

> Just because obscured or compiled files can be reverse-engineered
> doesn't mean that they meet the requirements of the GPL.

Just because you optimize a file doesn't make it uneditable, which is
the main thing the GPL wants. Look at the *intent*.

> This strains the natural interpretation of "preferred form of the work
> for making modifications to it."  It also makes the unfortunate
> implication that PHP obfuscators generate GPL-compatible source code.

PHP Obfuscators do not create easily editable source code. Minified
CSS *is* easily editable, no matter what you think. It's content has
not changed. The text has not changed. Only whitespace has been
removed, and whitespace can be trivially added back if you happen to
be the kind of person that needs it (I am not, because I use smart
text editors).

Quite simply, your argument is silly. There is a substantial
difference between deliberately obfuscating something to make it
difficult to edit and removing whitespace from files to make them
smaller. One is done with malicious intent. The other is not.

-Otto