HTML Turbo 2.0 from Voget Selbach Entertainment (VSE) is an HTML optimization utility designed to make your web pages the smallest and fastest loading possible. It works by eliminating any unnecessary and extraneous tags from your web pages, consolidating the code into several long lines, and modifying it where necessary to speed up the load time. One may naturally be skeptical of the benefits and effects of performing such a task, but the results are sure to astound you.
Simple and Clean Interface
Dragging and dropping files onto the HTML Turbo application is all it takes to take advantage of the program's functionality. HTML Turbo will then load and optimize your files, placing the optimized files in a folder on the desktop. The application will also give you a wealth of information, including the sizes of the files before and after, the overall savings, and the amount of bandwidth that you'll save thanks HTML Turbo. You can also drag and drop an entire directory (complete with subdirectories that contain HTML files) and HTML Turbo will recreate the directory, images and all, with the optimized HTML code, making it easy for you to optimize your entire site. A detailed log of all the files you've optimized is also maintained by the application.
There are a couple annoyances with HTML Turbo's interface and implementation. Each time you drag files onto the application a new folder will be created titled "HTML Turbo Optimized Files" (with numbers following for each additional folder). If you plan on dragging files from various sources, you'll quickly end up with multiple folders on the desktop. Also, if you drag and drop two or more files with identical names at the same time, only the first one will be optimized.
The savings and benefits
Although VSE claims that HTML Turbo will shrink your file sizes from 5-50%, that figure varies on how you create the HTML. If you code efficiently by hand, you'll see a savings of 5-15% on average, but if you use a WYSIWYG editor such as CyberStudio or Claris HomePage, your savings may be higher since such editors usually add considerably more unnecessary information. While the actual file savings may not seem all that great (after all, 10% of 10KB file is only 1KB), if you manage a popular web site and pay for the bandwidth, that file savings of 1KB suddenly jumps to 100MB of bandwidth savings if you receive 100,000 visitors a month. HTML Turbo also provides you with detailed reports as to what it did to your file and your speed and space savings.
While smaller file sizes are nice, they represent only a portion of the benefits that HTML Turbo offers. The more useful feature is the speed gains that an optimized file brings; the more efficient code means that browsers will render your pages noticeable faster. An optimized page seems to "snap" onto the screen, with no lags between the text and images being loaded and rendered. Optimization includes not only eliminating extraneous tags and spaces, but also qualifying URLs (adding a "/" at the end if necessary) and adding the height and width tags for images, both of which save the browser time from having to make a call to the server to obtain that information. The improved speed can be noticed regardless of your connection speed, although modem users in particular will benefit from it. Although the actual speed gains will vary, once a page has been optimized you'll never want to upload an unoptimized page again.
If perchance you find that HTML Turbo is affecting critical tags, such as removing quotation marks where they are needed, you can simply tell it to ignore all tags that begin with a certain name.
HTML Turbo leaves your original HTML file intact, for easy editing, and creates a new, optimized file that must be uploaded. It would be great, though, if there was some means to integrate HTML Turbo with your preferred FTP client, so that the in between steps of having to drag and drop the original file then upload the optimized one could be avoided.
An essential utility
HTML Turbo 2.0 is a utility that should be included in any avid web designer's toolbox. The benefits are noticeable and the cost is reasonable, making it a very well rounded product.
