This morning a coworker was commenting on how cool it was that Dojo includes functionality that will compress their JavaScript library by converting all human-readable javascript to short identifiers made up of underscores and numbers or letters ("a","1", etc). Compression births obfuscation.

All I could think of was all those hours, days, perhaps weeks I've spent viewing the source code of web pages that did cool stuff – stuff I wanted to learn how to build. Web 2.0 may be about open source backends and wizzy front-ends, but in the midst of it all I miss the simplicity and excitement of the Web-that-was.