Zap!

For anyone who writes their own HTML, this application is an essential addition to your development toolkit. The art of good web page design is to keep file sizes to a minimum, enabling a quick download for visitors to your site. Most people will compress their images, using software such as A Smaller GIF, but very few do the same with their web pages.

This is where ZAP!HTML comes into play. It compresses HTML code by anything from one to 50 per cent - the larger the file to begin with, the larger the compression. With download times being a major factor in a consumer's decision to view your site, it is all-important that you do everything possible to reduce the size of your files.

The process it uses is simple. It removes all the formatting which is essential for viewing the code whilst writing it, such as 'carriage returns', 'spaces' etc. Once the pages have been uploaded, these become unnecessary and make editing easier. The program overwrites the original pages with the new compressed version, so it's a good idea to duplicate your pages first so that if you do need to edit them later, you'll still have all the formatting included.

I tested ZAP! with plain HTML pages and those incorporating Javascript. The resulting compression is good, having no effect on the way the pages are displayed in the browser. Throughout the tests, I achieved a compression rate of around 15 per cent, but the pages I used were not particularly big.