A Lot to Like



by John H. Farr

The title of this review pretty much says it all: this spiffy application from VSE (Voget Selbach Entertainment GbR mbH) seems to do exactly what it claims and offers several unique capabilities. Judging the overall results is tricky, however, although the numbers do come down on Turbo's side.

What HTML Turbo claims to do is optimize your HTML documents so that "everything involved in retrieving a Web page is speeded up." As partner Johannes Selbach told this reviewer, "Turbo works best with HTML pages that were created with a WYSIWYG tool like Claris Home Page or Adobe PageMill. We created own own Web site with Claris Home Page and we could save more than 40 percent with VSE HTML Turbo." (I don't have to tell you that promising to reduce the size of my HTML documents by that much got my attention.)

All you have to do is drag your HTML documents or your entire web site folder into Turbo's main window and stand back: the application almost instantly creates a folder with identically-named optimized files. (The original files are not altered in any way that I could tell, fortunately. If you've ever loaded all your pages into something like HTML Grinder and accidentally launched a half-configured Find and Replace operation, you'll understand my choice of words!) The main window shows the size of the original file, the size of the compressed file, and the number and percentage of saved bytes. A Results window gives you a percentage breakdown of the average load and browser render speed increase and tells you how much space will be saved on the server. There's also a breakdown of these items for your specified home page. And the numbers themselves are quite convincing -- everything I tossed into Turbo came up lighter and leaner, no doubt about it. But if the window tells me the page is 1,008 bytes smaller and should load 12.6 percent more quickly, am I really going to notice it?

The way Turbo appears to work is by stripping out unnecessary HTML added by over-enthusiastic coders or WYSIWYG authoring programs, and by taking all the extra spaces out of your document. Call me inexperienced, but this last item surprised me. You see, in the pages I manually code (like this one), I always leave space between sections. Perhaps it's because I naturally form visual impressions of certain sections and remember them that way. This makes it much easier to scroll around and find things later when they need updating. Well, say goodbye to all that: your optimized pages will be mostly one long run-together string of text and tags! Whether you like this or not, they will certainly be smaller, and the compressed HTML will slide through your browser just fine. I uploaded an optimized homepage from my own site, the ZOO ZONE, and was happy to see it load and render normally. So here's where it gets tricky: with a 28.8 Kbps connection that frequently seemed to have a mind of its own, all my comparison tests between the original and the Turbo-optimized pages were inconclusive. I uploaded each page in turn, opened Netscape with a cleared browser cache, and timed the browser loading with a stopwatch. The fastest time noted was indeed for an optimized version, but the results were different with every test. To be fair, Turbo had only been able to shrink the page by 12.54 percent, and that is probably just too small a difference to show up in real-world web browsing.

Using Turbo was getting more and more interesting, though. I grabbed the source code for the most recent Farr Site and dropped it into the main window: savings, 5.8 percent. (You can't accuse Applelinks webmaster Joe Ryan of doing sloppy work!) Next I optimized a personal web document built with Claris Home Page: savings, 5.6 percent. (If your web pages are already nice and clean, you won't notice that much improvement.) You are free to download the Turbo demo and see what kind of results you get, of course -- and remember that you will still have your original files when you're done, so experiment all you want. Just for a hoot, I took a copy of another Farr Site page, opened it up, and simply deleted all the vertical spaces by hand. The result was a savings of 81 bytes!

Evaluating just how effective the application is really requires more testing than was possible for this review -- and if the incremental byte reduction in already lean HTML is to mean anything, one should probably optimize whole sites at a time: as a final test, I dumped all 6.6 MB and 259 files of the ZOO ZONE into Turbo's main window. The application quickly sorted out and processed all 57 HTML documents and saved 32K, or 8.54 percent. The greatest reduction observed in any one page was just over 15 percent. To test whether this makes a detectable difference would require uploading the compressed version of the whole site. There's less of it to upload and download, at least.

All of this leaves me impressed but unsure how enthusiastic to be. The software seems to work flawlessly and quickly for what it does. As in the case of VSE's Animation Maker program, HTML Turbo is a pleasure to use: the application feels very good to work with and the overall impression is of very high quality. There's something else that I think is worth mentioning, and that's the extraordinarily quick response and great public relations demonstrated by Voget and Selbach: they obviously care about their products and are eager to please. VSE HTML Turbo costs $79.95 and requires a PowerPC, OS 7.5.5 or higher, and 4 MB of RAM.

PROS:	Preferences window gives customized control of file types to be processed, tags to be removed, and file creator designation. Original files not altered. Fascinating statistics and a good user guide. Fun to use!
CONS:	Manual coders may not like the look of the results. Only minimal file size reduction possible with good HTML.
CONCLUSION:	If you're already thin, you don't need to lose weight. If you work with a WYSIWYG authoring program instead of a text editor, see if the demo version cuts your pages down to size, and if that speeds up your web site -- which it should -- Turbo could be worth the money. But since the performance increase was hard to quantify in my testing, I give it a "3." Just remember that you might have much better results!

John H. Farr edits the Apple Computer News for Applelinks.com and writes a weekly column. He satisfies his more creative urges by working on the ZOO ZONE, his own experimental cyber-sideshow.

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July 25, 2008