Smarter, more customizable 'type' for blocks

[jamesplease]

Presently, the blocks in usemin are set up like this:

<!-- build:<type>(alternate search path) <path> -->

where <type> is either js or css. If it was a good idea to limit the usemin task to one of two types, it seems like it'd be easy to detect this on the fly. References to external scripts use the <script src="">, and references to external stylesheets use <link href="">. This is enough information to determine whether the block is a js block or css block.

All of the parsing is already done for us, too. In file.js, something like:

last.type = asset[1] === 'src' ? 'js' : 'css';

would get the job done (you could set it up so that it uses, say, the first line of the block only)

With that said, I don't think it should limit you to just two types in the first place. What if you want to handle some of your scripts differently from others? One instance I can see this being useful would be source maps; you might want to generate source maps for some of your blocks, but not others.

Instead of the two-type limitation, usemin could instead allow for arbitrary types, like jsMap. For these non-standard ones, you would be required to generate the flow or it would throw an error.

If you ignore the type altogether, it could use the method I described at the beginning of this post to automatically assign the block to being js or css.

This would increase the power and flexibility of usemin a great deal, and it could easily be written to be backwards-compatible.

If I made a pull request with this feature, is there a chance it would merged?

[corbanbrook]

This is along the same lines you are talking about: #230

I like the idea of getting rid of type requirement (js and css) and just having the target specified.

[keenmedia]

What you are looking for might be possible with "grunt-file-blocks": https://github.com/rrharvey/grunt-file-blocks