I’ll just assume that you are using PHP here. Since the script tag that loads jQuery sits right in your HTML, and your HTML comes from the server, that’s where you will have to check which environment is applicable.

Ideally, you will want to be able to just dump your code on the server, where it should figure out on its own that some things have to be done differently now.

Be careful, though, not to get yourself into a bind here: you don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you have to make changes to your code every time you deploy it to the server. Okay, two versions for two environments, that’s easy enough.

Just to give you a visual aid, that’s exactly the ratio of the regular sized to the minified file of the current version of jQuery (1.6.4). You can have a look at the stack trace to see where the error originated, but it’s just that much easier to actually see what’s going on at all times, so for development you definitely want regular-sized.įun Fact: If you take a character count of the last two paragraphs, you will find that the second one is 2.598 times longer than the first one. In that case, your debugger will tell you that an error happened in some part of the jQuery code, but you can’t read any of that boiled down poppycock, and what’s worse, you don’t even know where to start with any deciphering ambitions, since the line number the debugger is pointing to is probably something like 1 - stripping out whitespace means that the whole code ends up in just a handful of absurdly long lines. There are good reasons not to use it in development, though: Your code relies on jQuery to do the grunt work, and it’s easily possible that a mistake you make goes unnoticed during the time your own code does its magic, but starts raising a stink when jQuery suddenly doesn’t have what it needs in order to actually do what you were asking. Once your website has gone live, you will want it to load as fast as possible, so that’s where this squeezed down version comes in. The minified version has a much smaller file size, which is accomplished by various methods, like stripping out whitespace and comments, and shortening variable names, which renders the whole thing basically unreadable for any human being. It’s pretty obvious what those versions are aiming at:

Fun-Sizedįirst of all, when you download jQuery, you have a choice to make: regular-sized (uncompressed) or minified.

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