with HTML Shrinker
HTML Shrinker FAQ
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 web space and bandwidth and your transfer 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 from html files as follows:
... and replaces:
These settings can be adapted in the Options dialog.
3. How high is the shrinking rate?
Here are the results of some shrinking tests with the old Version 1.07 of HTML
Shrinker. The results should be comparable to the 2.0 Light Version, although
it should be slightly better. The 2.0 Pro Version has a higher shrinking rate.
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| | | (triple shrinking + remove all images) | | | |
| | | (triple shrinking) | | | |
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| | | 101 K | | | |
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The shrinking of 48 various html files (with HTML Shrinker 1.07) 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 slightly smaller if you shrink them two or even three times.
Version 2.0 of HTML Shrinker offers an even better shrinking rate than Version
1.07. Additionally the Pro Version of HTML Shrinker 2.0 achieves a better shrinking
result than the Light Version, because it removes more unnecessary elements
than the Light Version. Here are the results of shrinking the front pages of
some famous web sites:
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26815 bytes |
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The average shrinking rate of these pages is 24% which is almost a quarter of the original size.
4. Is HTML Shrinker Freeware?
There are currently two versions or HTML Shrinker: the Light Version is Linkware and the Pro Version is commercial.
Linkware means that you can use it freely, but if you used it to optimize a
web site, you have to place one link to http://www.thepluginsite.com,
the homepage of HTML Shrinker, somewhere on the 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:
| with HTML Shrinker | | |
After you have placed the link on your site, please email me the URL, title and description (one sentence) of your site to get a link on the HTML Shrinker Link page.
If you aren't able to provide a link on a web page that was shrunken with HTML Shrinker, I recommend purchasing the Pro Version. With the Pro Version you don't need to place a link, although it would be nice if you did it nevertheless.
5. Can I shrink my web pages directly on the server?
Sorry, this isn't possible unless you are able to run HTML Shrinker directly on the web server. Otherwise you will have to shrink the html files on your local hard drive. Here's the general approach of using this tool:
1. Edit the html files on your local hard drive.
2. Start HTML Shrinker, select the html files and press the Shrink button or use the Shrink All button.
3. Connect to your web server and upload the files.
4. Start HTML Shrinker select the html files and press the Restore button.
You can omit step 4 if you use a visual html editor. If you use a text based
html editor, you should execute step 4 to make the html files better readable
again.
If you use HTML Shrinker Pro and shrink your files to a specific folder, you
can omit step 4 even if you use a text based html editor. But in this case you
have to take care of uploading the shrunken files from the specified folder
and not the original ones.
6. How do I use the Light Version?
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 extension ".bak". For example, if you shrunk 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.
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.
By activating the Remove All check boxes, you can even remove essential html elements. This can be useful if you downloaded html pages without their 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 activate or deactivate the appropriate check boxes.
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://thepluginsite.com/, so you can check if a new version of HTML Shrinker has been released.
7. Which additional features does the commercial Pro Version of HTML Shrinker offer?
HTML Shrinker Pro has some features that makes it easier to shrink your files especially if your web site has hundreds of pages. It works up to twice as fast as the freeware version when processing many pages in one batch and has a up to 50% higher shrinking rate. The shrinking of asp files, xml files, wml/wap files, wml/wap scripts and perl scripts is only possible in the Pro Version.
The Shrink All command lets you shrink all files in the current folder and its sub folders. It saves a lot of time, because you don't need to switch to all sub folders and select the files manually. Shrink Clipboard is for shrinking text on the clipboard. This can be useful if you're just editing a file.
There are two new features in the Options dialog. You can choose the number
of shrinking passes that are performed per file. For example specifying
a number of 3 means that HTML Shrinker Pro will shrink each file three times.
By doing so HTML Shrinker Pro will also be up to three times slower than usual.
The new Sites menu is for defining the root folders of your web sites and quickly jumping to them. Add Site lets you add the current folder to the Sites menu and Edit Site List displays a dialog for editing the site list which is displayed at the bottom of the Sites menu. Clicking on one of the names at the bottom of the Sites menu will switch to the base folder of the selected site.
8. HTML Shrinker damaged a web page. What shall I do?
As the syntax of HTML, Javascript and other web related languages is quite complex and as every browser interprets them differently, it is possible that a file shrunken with HTML Shrinker causes a problem. There shouldn't be any problems with simple html files, but that's no guarantee. So I generally recommend that you view every shrunken html file for problems.
First of all, use the HTML Shrinker's Restore feature to get the old version of the file. Then deactivate one (or more) of the check boxes in the 'Remove All Unnecessary' frame of the Option dialog and shrink the file again. If the file doesn't cause problems anymore, you should keep this check box disabled.
The most common problem iscaused by special comments or java scripts. So you should at first try to deactivate 'Elements within Scripts' or 'Comments...'. Keeping these check boxes disabled will decrease the shrinking rate, but avoid problems.
If you are confronted with a problem caused by HTML Shrinker, please send me the original file that caused the problem, so I can remove the bug and improve HTML Shrinker.
9. What about mistakes in my HTML code?
In some cases mistakes in your HTML code can provoke HTML Shrinker to parse the code incorrectly and cause errors in the shrunken file. Here are some things that create errors when shrinking a file:
<script>
<!-- This is a comment -->
<!-- And this is another one -->
alert ('hello world");
</script>
please replace <!-- --> with // or /* and */, otherwise you'll get
an error message for the shrunken file. The following code wouldn't cause
an error message:
<script>
/* This is a comment */
// And this is another one
alert ('hello world");
</script>