What is the use for the special "public" folder in a Meteor app?

I'm currently using Meteor and trying to learn more about the framework. In the documentation about special directories the following is said about the public/ special directory:

All files inside a top-level directory called public/ are served as-is to the client. When referencing these assets, do not include public/ in the URL, write the URL as if they were all in the top level. For example, reference public/bg.png as <img src='/bg.png' />. This is the best place for favicon.ico, robots.txt, and similar files.

My question is: since I refer to files inside of public/ directory as if they were located in the root folder of my application, what's the different between putting the files in the public/ folder and in the root folder? Or is it just for organization sake?

Also the documentation I quoted above makes some examples using assets (some pngs and favicon.ico) and no JavaScript or HTML files. Am I able to put some JavaScript code in there and then import them in another file by referencing as if this code was located in the root of my app? Or is the public/ directory somewhat made only for assets?

I failed to find any docs that explains what is done to files inside this directory in detail (I only found what I quoted above). So if any documentation of that kind is available it would help a lot!

Solution

My question is: since I refer to files inside of public/ directory as if they were located in the root folder of my application, what's the different between putting the files in the public/ folder and in the root folder? Or is it just for organization sake?

Just because you can reference or "import" a file from public/ doesn't mean it functions in the same way to how a normal file import would work. Files located in public gets served as is without being minified/run through the Meteor pipleline. Second, these files are accessible to the client which makes sense given how'd import them without preceding slashes and keep them mostly to serve stuff like favicon and what not.

So in a sense, such files within public are made available within relation to your client bundle/code whilst not being a part of them, get it?

This way of serving assets isn't unique to Meteor, even React has a public directory.

Also the documentation I quoted above makes some examples using assets (some pngs and favicon.ico) and no JavaScript or HTML files. Am I able to put some JavaScript code in there and then import them in another file by referencing as if this code was located in the root of my app? Or is the public/ directory somewhat made only for assets?

AFAIK, you can have files of any type in public but since

It's served as is to the client, meaning it's exposed to the public
It doesn't get minified (i.e being part of the final application build code)

You're advised to not have any of the application code within this directory.