HTML Shrinker 
Copyright 1999-2000 by Harald Heim



1. What is HTML Shrinker? 

HTML Shrinker is a tool for reducing the size of various html file types. As a consequence your web site will load faster, need less bandwidth and your monthly traffic volume will decrease. 


2. How does it work? 

HTML Shrinker removes all unnecessary bytes within html
files. The look of the html page won't change after it is compressed. It just looks like before. You won't see a difference, only the file size will be smaller. HTML Shrinker currently removes the following things from html files:

- unnecessary end of lines   
- unnecessary quotes within tags   
- unnecessary spaces   
- unnecessary shift spaces (&nbsp)   
- all tabs  
- all unnecessary comments
- all unnecessary bytes within scripts and java tags

These settings can be adapted in the Options dialog.


3. Is it Freeware? 

Yes and No, actually it's Linkware. That means that, if you
used it to optimize your web site, you have to place one link to
http://pico.i-us.com, the homepage of HTML Shrinker, somewhere on your web site.
You don't need to place a link on every optimized html page, one link -
preferably on the main page - is enough. If you have placed the link on your site, please email me to get a reciprocal link from the HTML Shrinker page. Like Freeware programs, you are allowed to distribute the HTML Shrinker package as you like, as long as you don't change any file.
After you have placed the link on your site, please email the URL and title of your site to harry@visca.com to get a link on the HTML Shrinker page.


4. How do I use it? 

At first select the folder where some html files are
located, select the file(s) you want to shrink and finally press the Shrink button or select Shrink from the menu. The result of the shrinking process will be displayed in the text box. The original html files(s) won't be deleted,  they will be renamed with the the extension ".bak". For example, if you  shrinked Test.htm, there will be two files: Test.htm (the shrunken version) and Test.htm.bak (the original file). Pressing the Shrink button a second time can reduce the file size of very large html files even further. But it won't have an effect on smaller html files.

By activating the Remove All check boxes, you can even remove essential html elements. This can be useful, if you downloaded html pages without its images and want to view, print or archive them without ugly empty image boxes. In the Options dialog you can choose which elements (see point 2!) HTML Shrinker will remove from your html files. Additionally you can set the minimum gain that has to be reached to make HTML Shrinker shrink a file. E.g. entering a value of 100, means that only if a file can be shrunken by 100 or more bytes, HTML Shrinker will actually shrink it. To undo the shrinking, select the shrunken file(s) and press the Restore button or select Restore from the menu. By doing so the
shrunken file(s) will be deleted and replaced with the original version(s). So you don't have to worry that the original files will be lost.

To view a html file, select it from the file list and double click it, press the View button or select View from the menu. The browser associated with html file will then be invoked and will display the html file. You can delete all backup/original files (with the .bak extension) in the current folder by selecting Remove Backups from the menu.

Selecting Look for New Version will connect you to http://pico.i-us.com/, so you can check, if a new version of HTML Shrinker has been released.


5. Does HTML Shrinker have any bugs? 

HTML Shrinker was tested with a variety of html files and it didn't damage any of them. There shouldn't be any problems with simple html files, but that's no guarantee. So I recommend that you view every shrunken html file for problems. If you encounter a problem, you can still use the Restore feature to undo the shrinking. In this case I would be glad, if you could send me this file, so I can remove the bug.


6. Improvements 

Version 1.07:

- Server Side Includes (SSI) are left untouched now
- Visual SourceSafe comments aren't removed anymore
- Asp, php and java tags are supported now
- Improved shrinking of scripts and java tags
- The following file types are now displayed and processed by default: htm, html, shmtl, jhtml, xml, cfm, cfml, js
- New option: Don't create backup file
    
Version 1.05:

- Better compression
- New option for shrinking java scripts
- The shift/non breaking spaces option has been removed from the Options
dialog, cause it changes the layout of web pages. It is now available
from the main windows as "NB Spaces"
- New option for defining the displayed file types in the Options dialog     
Version 1.03:

- Options dialog for defining your own shrinking options   
- No shrinking within <Pre> Tags   
- Larger main dialog   
- Some smaller improvements and bug fixes. 

Version 1.01:

- Necessary spaces aren't removed anymore   
- "Remove all Images/Scripts/Styles" are deactivated after each session


Harald Heim 
harry@visca.com 
http://pico.i-us.com

