[Jetrel]

To help clarify for the person you're replying to; minification could be considered to only mean: taking an interpreted language like JS, and essentially compressing the text of the code by doing transformations to it that don't change the semantic meaning of the code. Swapping out long variable/function names with short, computer-generated single(ish)-letter names. Removing whitespace.

Much of this was because real compression methods like zip simply weren't available during early decades of web development.

Obviously, if shrinking the code size is desirable, and you were building a library that did minification, you'd want to move on to also adding other, more dangerous changes that could change the meaning of the code, like removing unused CSS classes, doing DCE on javascript, etc, etc.

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Since programming is a giant, decentralized soup of autodidacts, there's no "word of god" authority that can really say "this is the one true name of something". It's mostly just lingo that passes in and out of various communities, and a lot of times communities (as you're seeing in splintercell's comment) try to helpfully match themselves up and standardize so it doesn't degenerate into pure chaos.