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:
These settings can be adapted in the Options dialog.
3. How high is the shrinking rate?
Here are the results of some shrinking tests:
(triple shrinking + remove all images) | |||||
(triple shrinking) | |||||
101 K | |||||
The shrinking of 48 various html files which had the total size of 534 K resulted in a gain of 61 K which corresponds to an average shrinking rate of 11%. But as you can see from the results in the table above, the individual shrinking rate can be up to 50%.
Especially pages with many tables, pages created by WYSIWYG editors and pages containing large java scripts will profit from HTML Shrinker. Another result of these shrinking tests is that very large html files (> 100 K) get even smaller if you shrink them two or even three times.
4. Is it Freeware?
Yes and No, actually it's Linkware. That means that you can distribute the HTML Shrinker package as you like, as long as you don't change any file. But 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. Here are three examples of such links:
This site was optimized with HTML Shrinker
After you have placed the link on your site, please email me the URL and title of your site to get it mentioned on the HTML Shrinker page.
5. 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 changed the file types which are displayed in the main window enter them
under Displayed Files. E.g. to display all files enter *.* to display
htm & html files enter enter *.htm;*.html But better leave this text
field as it is, unless you have files with a different file extension which
contain html code.
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.
6. 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 garantee. 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 the original file that caused a problem, so I can remove the bug.
7. Version History
Version 1.07 (5th February 2000):
Version 1.05 (14th August 1999):
Version 1.03 (23rd July 1999):
Version 1.01 (3rd July 99):
Harald Heim
harry@visca.com
http://pico.i-us.com