After one day of playing with HTML-Optimizer I have to say that I'm impressed—both with the app itself and with the developer.

To wit, I noticed that the Tonbrand Software web pages don't validate. So, I fired off a polite inquiry to the developer to ask why, and received a speedy reply with a satisfactory answer. Essentially, it was that the validation errors were minor—things like optional end tags and unneeded quotation marks—and in any case they could be cleaned up by a simple change of settings in HTML-Optimizer's preferences. It wasn't that important to him, because his pages displayed properly on all major browsers anyway. Hmmm...OK, fair enough.

Then came a second message informing me that the next update of HTML-Optimizer will include those preferences settings as the default, achieving validation for XHTML code (which is what I use) on the first bounce. That kind of responsiveness is a very good sign, considering the fact that I had only run the software for a one-day trial.

I ran HTML-Optimizer on a couple of pages I built in iWeb, and it knocked 53% off the page size for one of them, and 46% for the other one. They load much faster since then.

One of the features of HTML-Optimizer that was immediately attractive is the fact that it creates a duplicate copy of the site and then optimizes that, leaving the original code intact. You can publish the optimized code only when you're sure you want to commit the changes. Nice!

There's no question that HTML-Optimizer is a well-designed, eminently useful, and diligently supported application—well worth the cost of the license.