For the answer to this question see the complete Mizer version history, which has been kept with meticulous detail since day one.
Q - What platforms is Mizer™ available for?
Mizer is of course available for Macintosh. Mizer is also available for Windows 95/98/NT, but development between platforms is not concurrent and not expected to be concurent for a time.
The most recent Windows release is 1.5. The most recent Macintosh release is 1.8. There are some differences in functionality between them now. Specific functionality found in 1.8 that is not present in the Windows version of 1.5 is GIF optimization.
Q - Why should I use Mizer?
If you aren't using Mizer, your pages aren't as fast as they could be. They aren't downloading as fast as they could be, and they aren't rendering as quickly as they could be. Speed is crucial for web pages, as most professionals are well aware.
The faster your page is readable by your visitors, the more will stick around to read what you have to say, and the better their impression will be of your site and your company and product or your client's site and product.
Everyone in business knows that more exposure with better first impressions translates to a lot more money generated from the marketing effort. That includes the first impression of all your clients if you design sites for others. Faster is better for business, and since Mizer can make all your pages faster, it will improve your business. $69.95 is a small cost for that. It is so low, you would be unwise not to invest in Mizer if you are making pages professionally.
Q - How does Mizer speed things up?
Mizer automatically removes unneeded information in HTML and JavaScript syntax making it smaller and more easily parseable by browsers. Mizer also optimizes JPEG and GIF images making graphics smaller and faster as of version 1.5 for JPEGs and 1.7 for GIFs. Depending on how your pages were made there is up to 50% of useless or redundant information in them.
The most basic formatting for sake of readability typically introduces 10 - 20% of extra information as spaces, tabs, and returns that a browser must parse through and ignore. That information has a purpose - to make your syntax easily readable for authoring - but it is useless, slow fat for servers and browsers. The other forms of unnecessary information are actual syntax elements that are either unneeded as the case with many quotes around attribute values, many comments, many tag attributes and also many tags. These get introduced in two ways. You put them through habit or misunderstanding of what was actually needed, or your WYSIWIG authoring tool did for whatever reasons it has.
Images are also subject, and often more so, to redundant extraneous information just the same as HTML. Applications that embed unknown and unneeded data in image files are the norm, not the exception. Ill chosen settings when savings either on an application or a user level can also contribute to unnecessarily bloated files.
In the case of HTML, since it is editable by hand, there are two ways you can fix that problem. The first and much harder, is you can re-read all the how-to information available about HTML, sorting out the good from the bad, until you can write pages by hand, provided you can take the eye strain involved since you can't format it so you can read it anymore to do this, that are as lean and fast as possible.
You don't have another option to perform the JPEG and GIF optimization that Mizer provides. It's not possible to do it by hand or with another tool. However, there are better tools for initial JPEG and GIF creation than you may be using. ProJPEG and PhotoGIF from BoxTop Software, Inc. would be the best. If you are not familiar with them, you can learn more at http://www.boxtopsoft.com
Then again you could just use Mizer and forget about it.
When you do a domino effect will start that will result in your pages being much, much faster:
1: Since the source file is smaller, the server reads and sends it faster so the browser starts receiving the information sooner.
2: The browser is able to parse the arriving data much faster because all unnecessary data has been eliminated. This allows the browser to make http requests for images faster and allows text information to the rendered much more quickly by the browser. This helps hold attention spans of viewers because text elements appear almost immediately. As has been described by Mizer users, the text "snaps" onto the page.
3: Since the browser was able to render the text portions of the page more quickly, rendering images is also faster because there is less conflict for cpu power between rendering the text and rendering the images. Images also arrive sooner to be rendered sooner because they were requested sooner and are smaller for shorter image download times.
4: Because everything involved in retrieving a page is speed up, overall server performance and connection performance is increased as well. Page retrievals take less time to complete so the average number of conncurrent connections is reduced meaning more server cpu time and more connection bandwidth are available to satisfy each individual page request.
What Mizer does is much more than just making HTML or even graphics files a little smaller, as you can see now. Compared to the initial careful creation of source and graphics taking the final file sizes into account, which could potentially save much more raw size than Mizer can, it may seem trivial to knock a K or two more off your files, but when you realize how and how much those particular bytes make a difference in overall page performance the need for Mizer is clear.
Q - But, I like my syntax the way it is... ?
Of course you do, everyone has their own way of doing things, and there is no reason to change that. In fact it's because of Mizer that you don't have to worry about changing your authoring habits for the sake of cleaner, faster pages.
Mizer is a last step tool to use immediately before publishing your pages to your server, not for use on your editing copies. It even comes with an applet that automates the entire process of optimizing and uploading your site using Fetch. Just point the applet at the top level folder for your site, and in a few minutes you'll have optimized pages on your server without a single change to your local files or a single extra step.
It couldn't get much more convenient, and there isn't any conflict in using Mizer with the way you make pages at all, as long as you keep a local copy of files for editing, which is a general practice of most people and a very good habit.
Q - Does my syntax have to be perfect for Mizer to work?
No. Your syntax doesn't have to meet validation standards. It can be blatantly broken, in fact, and Mizer could still optimize it. Mizer is perfect, so you don't have to be.
Q - Will Mizer ever change the appearance of my Web pages?
No. At worst with broken syntax, proprietary markup, or advances in the future Mizer may be a little less efficient than possible, but will never change the way your Web page renders.
Q - Will Mizer fix my syntax errors?
No. Mizer will not fix bad syntax. It just won't break it any worse or fail to optimize it because it's bad. What goes in is the same as comes out, only less information that isn't needed by the browser to render the page correctly.
Because Mizer is a last step tool to use just before publishing pages, you really shouldn't use it on pages that haven't been finished and tested in browsers. If at that point the pages work, they will work just the same after Mizer.
Q - What does Mizer take out?
You can think of Mizer as an Web cleaner. It takes out all the trash from formatting to tags that aren't needed by browsers, so your page will load and render as quickly as possible. These include spaces, tabs, returns, quotes, comments, redundant tag attributes, and optional close tags. Mizer™ also changes DOS style two byte CRLF (carriage return/linefeed) returns to UNIX style one byte LF (linefeed) returns when encountered.
The circumstances that dictate what is fluff and what is critical information can be complex, but Mizer™ makes lean and mean syntax as simple as a Drag & Drop, and clean syntax loads and renders much faster.
Specifically in the current version (1.8) in *addition* to unneeded formatting information the following syntax elements are removed:
1: Redundant tag attributes, which can depend on value and surrounding syntax.
2: Optional closing tags when enabled and as configured with defaults as defined by the HTML specs, but only when the browsers actually agree.
3: A variety of WYSIWIG fluff that is ignored by browsers
4: All C '/* comment */' and C++ style '// comment' JavaScript comments except the opening '<!-- //' and closing '// -->' comments that are traditionally used to hide JavaScript amd CSS syntax from older browsers.
5: All HTML comments that are not server side includes or preprocessing directives.
And not to forget the new GIF and JPEG optimization, which will make sure your images are also small, fast and clean.
If there is something you think Mizer™ should be taking out/fixing/compensating for that it is not now, email to let us know at support@antimonysoftware.com
Q - What is the average savings in file size with Mizer™?
The short answer was about 12% for pages authored by hand and about 22% for pages created with WYSIWYG authoring tools, with individual file results ranging from less than 1% to 54%, based on a statistical sample of 1571 random web pages that were retrieved with a robot.
It is safe to say it does much better than that now since statistics have not been run for the last several updates. You should see a considerable amount of savings. The Antimony site, all done neatly by hand with BBEdit, was 21% smaller after optimization with version 1.5.
The long answer was (as of version 1.2)...
1571 files totaling 16,567,659 bytes (15.8 MB) were fed into Mizer™ 1.2. 18 minutes later, it produced 1571 files totaling 14,742,451 bytes (14 MB) of optimized HTML. That is a total file size savings of 1,816,589 bytes (1.7 MB) for the equivalent of Disney's web site in numbers of files. (Just guessing at how many files are on Disney's site. It's probobly more than that.)
Compared to Mizer™ 1.0, which only saved 1,449,724 bytes (1.4 MB) on the same set of files, Mizer™1.2 is roughly 25% improved from the previous version.
The average size of files being optimized was 10,546 bytes (10.3 K) with actual original file sizes ranging from 4,150 bytes (4 K) to 415,241 bytes (405.5 K).
The average size of optimized files was 9384 bytes (9.2 K) with actual optimized file sizes ranging from 3,673 bytes (3.6 K) to 382,618 bytes (373.7 K).
Expressed in bytes, the average savings per file was 1,156 bytes (1.1 K) with actual savings ranging from 224 bytes to 32,623 bytes (31.9 K).
The actual file distribution from the test is below. There were no files that were not made at least 224 bytes smaller, and only 13 files where there was less than 1% overall savings. Most files saved 5 - 16%, although it is not uncommon for savings over 30% to be seen. In this test 99 files saved more than 30%.
13 files less than 1%
53 files 1 - 2%
131 files 2 - 3%
116 files 3 - 4%
127 files 4 - 5%
128 files 5 - 6%
91 files 6 - 7%
135 files 7 - 8%
68 files 8 - 9%
45 files 9 - 10%
38 files 10 - 11%
42 files 11 - 12%
40 files 12 - 13%
22 files 13 - 14%
80 files 15 - 15%
52 files 15 - 16%
42 files 16 - 17%
39 files 17 - 18%
28 files 18 - 19%
21 files 19 - 20%
7 files 20 - 21%
10 files 21 - 22%
8 files 22 - 23%
8 files 23 - 24%
12 files 24 - 25%
9 files 25 - 26%
18 files 26 - 27%
50 files 27 - 28%
22 files 28 - 29%
17 files 29 - 30%
3 files 30 - 31%
6 files 31 - 32%
22 files 32 - 33%
15 files 33 - 34%
3 files 34 - 35%
3 files 35 - 36%
6 files 36 - 37%
6 files 37 - 38%
8 files 38 - 39%
3 files 39 - 40%
2 files 41 - 42%
2 files 42 - 43%
4 files 43 - 44%
2 files 44 - 45%
4 files 45 - 46%
2 files 46 - 47%
1 files 47 - 48%
1 files 48 - 49%
4 files 49 - 50%
1 files 51 - 52%
1 files 53 - 54%
Savings in HTML file sizes do correspond directly to faster download times for HTML files, but the overall increase in page rendering (the total time it takes the page to be readable by your viewers) speed is much greater than the decrease in download time. It is a cumulative domino effect when HTML is optimized and a 12% savings in file size for your page can easily mean your viewers see the page 30% faster.
Q - Will Mizer™ ever break my Java Scripts?
No. Mizer™ will also optimize your Java Script syntax along with your HTML syntax, but like your HTML it will never effect the working of your script, so long as your JavaScript syntax was correct. Mizer™ will patently ignore any other script languages. If you use VBScript for example, it will leave it alone because it doesn't understand it.
Q - Will Mizer™ work with WSYIWIG HTML authoring tools?
Yes. Mizer™ doesn't care how the page was made, and will do its best to optimize any file ending with a recognized extension even if it's really an Excel spread sheet file. PageMill, CyberStudio, HomePage, Lasso, ColdFusion, FrontPage it doesn't matter. Mizer™ will work.
Source files generated by WSYIWIG tools are often in greater need of optimization than those authored by hand, as well.
Mizer™ specifically compensates for some of the bad practices of PageMill, HomePage, and BBEdit, which does have some bad practices despite being the best text editor in the world, though not really a WYSIWYG tool.
Q - Will Mizer™ work with HTML+, XML, proprietary markup, etc.?
Yes. Mizer™ "knows" all past HTML specification through the current 4.0 specification, and will optimize source based on known elements from those. When unknown syntax is encountered, Mizer™ does not take any action on that unknown syntax element. It plays it safe for forwards compatibility.
It works to optimize any kind of HTML, and will keep on optimizing so long as there is even as little as a <P> tag in common between the syntax you have and all the current specifications.
As new specifications are adopted, Mizer™ will become less efficient at optimization, but I will trying hard to keep up so it doesn't stay less than perfect for long.
Q - Does Mizer™ remove HTML comments to make files smaller?
Yes, but very carefully. HTML comments are now removed as of version 1.5 if and only if they're not used for server side includes or preprocessing directives, and what constitutes a server side include or preprocessing directive is configurable to allow for proprietary systems.
The same mechanism used to identify a server side include to be left in can be used to leave copyright statements or any other desired HTML comments in place, as well.
Q - Does Mizer™ remove Meta information to make files smaller?
Nope. Meta information is most often functional and desired content.
Q - What if Mizer™ doesn't make my pages smaller?
It would be a first. The actual results achieved by Mizer™ will vary. That is a given because no two HTML pages are the same and there are many different ways to make them. Some are better and some are worse, but all, including meticulous hand authoring, have some fluff. In the tens of thousands of pages Mizer™ has been tested on since development began it's made every single one smaller.
It will make your pages smaller, too.
Q - Why isn't there a demo version of Mizer™ available?
Despite the growing pervasiveness of software demos, more software than not doesn't have one. There are many reasons why as varied as the software itself. Often demos are not very practical with particular software, or as in the case with Mizer™, demos would be a strain upon available resources, and detract from the quality of software and support.
It is our goal to sell the best software with the best support because in the end that is the only way to sell the most software, and for a small company with that goal in mind there are better ways to ensure customers a safe purchase than demos that could not be well supported for lack of personnel.
At any time in the first 30 days you decide Mizer™ is not the right tool for you, you can return it for a full refund from Digital River, our distributor and a publicly traded company regulated by the SEC (NASDAQ:DRIV), with no questions asked.
Q - Will you/are you planning to add (feature/capability) to Mizer™?
Maybe. However, as a rule we will neither confirm or deny future plans until they are very close to being present realities.
Feedback is extremely valuable, but when phrased as a question, can't really be answered.
Q - How does the new JPEG optimization work?
Mizer™ removes application specific information embedded in JFIF JPEG files, leaving the minimum data that browsers read as the final optimized JPEG file.
This process is lossless for the JPEG file. It does not change compression parameters or data in the image in any way, only the encapsulating structure of the JFIF JPEG file.
Savings from the JPEG optimization will vary by creating application for JPEG files, with the most savings experienced to date coming from files created by Adobe Photoshop 4.0, though little comparative testing has been performed among image editing applications to determine which actually ads the most unneeded information to JPEG files or what average savings from it may be given the many different applications creating JPEG files.
Suffice it to say, that a lot of size can be saved this way, often the extra data embedded in a JPEG file will be twice the size of the actual JPEG image once extra information is removed.
Q - How does the new GIF optimization work?
Currently Mizer™ ensures that GIF files do not contain any redundant information, such as embedded vanity comments from the creating software, unsupported application extension, unused palettes, and also ensures that images are compressed at the lowest possible bit depths. Like optimizations performed on JPEG images, the GIF optimization is lossless.
It will produce the smallest GIF file possible without altering the image in any way.
Q - What are the system requirements to use Mizer™?
Mizer™ for Macintosh:
Mizer™ needs at least System 7.5.5 with the Appearance Manager, Thread Manager, Apple Events Manager, and the Drag Manager present. Apple Script isn't needed to use Mizer™, but is if you intend to script Mizer™. A PowerPC based Macintosh is also needed to run Mizer™. 68k machines are no longer supported in version 1.5.
In simple terms, everything Mizer™ needs is built into System 8.0 and up. Earlier systems need certain extensions installed that are given below.
System 7.5.x you need the following extensions installed:
Appearance Manager
Thread Manager
ThreadLib
AppleScript - Optional, needed for scripting
AppleScriptLib - Optional, needed for scripting
System 8.x you need the following extensions installed:
AppleScript - Optional, needed for scripting
AppleScriptLib - Optional, needed for scripting
Base RAM requirements for Mizer™ are very low. A RAM partition of 1024K or 1 MB is suggested and will cover just about everything.
Disk space usage is trivial in today's climate of 50 MB applications. It only takes about 400K of hard disk space to install Mizer™ and all its support files.
Mizer™ for Windows:
Mizer™ requires Windows 95/98 or Windows NT 4.0 or better.
Q - What is the most current version of Mizer™
Mizer™ for Macintosh:
Version 1.8, build #712 is the most current version at the time of this writing, but if you've got an old copy of the FAQ it might not be the current version anymore. If any doubt, you can check the version of the FAQ on the Antimony Web site: http://www.antimonysoftware.com
The build number is significant because version numbers stay the same between pre-release distributions of Mizer™.
You can tell which version and build of Mizer™ you have by selecting the application icon in the Finder and getting info for it with Command - I or the "Get Info..." command in the Finder's File menu.
You should see a line as follows that contains precise version information.
"Version: Mizer 1.7 US Final - build #712"
Mizer for Windows:
Version 1.5 is the most current version at the time of this writing.
On Windows, version information is shown by the About menu item. There are no build numbers for the Windows version, and no pre-release versions distributed externally for Windows.
