1Crunch

Crunch! is a command-line application which removes unnecessary information from HTML files Crunch! is a command-line application which removes unnecessary information from HTML files. If you use a web authoring system such as Microsoft FrontPage or Netscape Gold, or even if you write your own web pages, you're likely to wind up with files that contain lots of unnecessary characters and tags. Crunch! strips these from your web pages, often reducing their size by 10% to 50%.

Crunch! also helps you to spot HTML coding errors. After crunching, links with missing quotation marks or incorrectly terminated HTML tags show up as errors when viewed with a browser.

Crunching your HTML files is also a great way to stop data pirates. Crunched HTML is nearly unreadable, and "borrowing" your code becomes extremely tedious for would-be thieves.

Crunch! is a command-line program, so you can execute it from a DOS box or from the Windows Run command. Running it without any arguments will produce this brief usage summary:

C:>crunch
Crunch! Version 1.2 (c) 1996-1997 Tennyson Maxwell. All Rights Reserved.
Usage: crunch [/ncq] inputdir outputdir
/n = no output (quiet mode)
/c = strip html comments
/q = strip unnecessary quotes
C:>

Just specify any or all of the four optional flags (s,n,c,q) and give Crunch! the path to the input directory (where your original web pages are stored) and an output directory (where you want the crunched pages placed). Be sure to specify the /s flag if you need Crunch! to recurse subdirectories.

May mangle scripts. In general, don't use the /q or /c flags with HTML files that contain scripts, and always test them afterward to make sure they still work.
Generally speaking, it is a good idea to use the /q flag (except with scripts, see above). Unnecessary quotation marks can take up significant space in HTML files, and the only good reason to keep them is readability. Of course, after crunching, HTML readability drops to nil anyway.
We do NOT recommend using the /c option unless you are SURE your web pages do not include Java or scripting code. Any of these languages may store necessary information in HTML comments. Stripping comments may, therefore, change the displayed content of your web pages.