Mizer is the first utility aimed at optimizing the actual HTML code of a web page, in contrast to the many utilities that trim the size of the graphics. It does this by eliminating any unnecessary tags or formatting that a web browser doesn't use, saving precious bytes from each of your HTML files. Its effectiveness, however, is somewhat disappointing.
Your mileage may vary
If you design sites using a text-editor, chances are you use only the essential tags with a comment or two thrown in there and carriage returns, tabs, and spaces to help you follow the formatting. Under such circumstances, Mizer yields hardly any savings at all. The entire MacNN Review website occupies 518,088 bytes (506k) - a rather large amount of text. But only 9,724 bytes (9.5k) were saved by optimizing it with Mizer - equal to 1.8%. That 9.5k of savings was spread out over more than 70 HTML documents, which means that each page lost an unnoticeable amount of size and load time.
On the other hand, pages created under WYSIWYG editors showed more promising signs, although mostly due to their their tendency to format HTML more than most people would to make it easier to follow when reading raw HTML.Tags, such as the naturalflagsize tag that Pagemill employs and which no browser uses, were eliminated, saving slightly more space. These savings generally came up around 5%, though, not nearly close to the 20% Antimony Software claims their product will save.
Either way, though, the savings that Mizer produces are slim, and with today's connections to the internet, an extra .5k here and there will go unnoticed. Graphics are the major contributor to the WorldWideWait; often times a 5k page may contain 50k worth graphics. Saving even 5% of the graphics size will have a more noticeable effect than eliminating some HTML. Although Mizer is a unique utility and sports some nice features such as easy scriptability and integration with FTP clients, if you're looking to decrease the load times for your site, you're much better off looking at a utility that creates smaller graphics.
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