I posted this question in the Office 365 forum and was referred here. Hope someone can help enlighten me.
I'm a SharePoint 2013 newbie, non-developer, non-designer and receiving assistance with the branding of our site. I understood it to be a great benefit to have the master page associated with an HTML page for the purpose of readily making design changes. The approach taken by our designer is to work directly with a new master page (no HTML file). From what little I comprehend and just taking a look at the first page of the OOB minimal.master, it seems our new custom master lacks quite a bit of that code and the first few lines reference different versions of "Microsoft.SharePoint". Perhaps this is normal but I've read that minimal.master "contains only those page elements required by SharePoint to render the page in the browser". Does this mean the master should contain at least those lines to render properly or does a very clever developer rewrite that too? Additionally they have commented out the <SharePoint:CssLink runat="server" Version="15" /> and I understand this to be a means to replace the OOB css with minified CSS for improved performance. ALL WELL AND GOOD. The rendered design looks just as we requested. However, I would like reassurance that not having the code we see in minimal.master and suppressing the OOB css is not going to someday soon break our site (or maybe just a few pages) when it is regularly updated in the online environment. I also want to be sure this will not preclude us from enjoying any new features that may be delivered with those updates. Many thanks in advance for educating this SharePoint Admin Wannabee!