Question

I am writing a little custom minifier for javascript, and I am wondering if I need to force line breaks after a certain number of characters on a single line, or if it matters at all?

For example, I can minify an entire script into a single line with thousands of characters, or every n characters, I could insert a line break (at an acceptable point in the js code) to drop it to the next line.

Is there a reason to do this, or is does javascript/browsers not care how many characters are on a line?

Answer 1

You can put an entire script on one line, it makes no difference to the parser.

However breaking content onto lines of about 4kB may be beneficial to the downloader, slightly improving performance.