First minify, then maxify...
To show our commitment towards you, and following up on our previous blog post where we said that we will share as much knowledge as possible, we would like to let you know that almost all our JavaScript files will be available in a non-minified format. These will be accessible by replacing .min with .max and the resultant file will be the original JavaScript file prior to having it compressed.
The original idea was taken from Daniel Eden on his blog post who argued that by compressing our stylesheets, whilst we are reducing bytes and improving speed we are making the CSS unreadable and other designers are not able to learn from our work.
The same concept could be applied for JavaScript. Minified JavaScript looks like one huge block of code, without comments or structure, making understanding it almost impossible. How many times were you on a website and saw something fancy and you right-click > view source and try to understand how it works (and perhaps use it later on in one of your own projects)? Speaking from personal experience, it is a very familiar situation, although with the increased use of minified files it has become increasingly challenging to extract useful, understandable JavaScript or CSS.
That is why we support Daniel's idea and together with our compressed files, we will also include the original file which we used, uncompressed, structured and usually containing useful comments which we ourselves used. As we said, we want everyone to do awesome websites and hope that every helping hand will count.
Kevin