The "Fooles Troupe Home" site - Google it :-) has several different VERY simple styles, each one deliberately chosen for each different section for visual contrast. ALL the code was handwritten in Notepad (or other similar simple text editors, some with the ability to code check in colour, or add HTML constructs with simple keypress macros!)

I tried using several of those 'assistance' programs, but the code generated could often be up to 10 times longer, making it damn near impossible to find and fix minor changes later on, especially when one no longer had access to those original useless pieces of crap! And if you CHANGED the 'assistance' SW, the results could be horrendous, as each one 'improved' the existing crap it found to start with .... so I stripped it all out by hand (global search and replace!) and kept it simple, using the standard defaults.

The whole couple of hundred pages of code of the FT site runs at about 3.5 Megabyte - including all the graphics and music files!


One of the tricks was to UNDERSTAND HTML - and USE THE defined DEFAULTS - which most of these piles of crap insist on spelling out, sometimes in subtly differing ways 'for improvement!' - thus massively bloating the code unnecessarily. This can be a trap when the clever bastards insist on using the Microsoft 'non-standard' way of doing things, which changes in the next version! Giving an ignorant fool a 'simple' tool to fiddle about with concepts he does not really understand, is not always helpful! :-)

I actually once found a 4 Kb block of code (which looked like it may have originally come from a scanned input!) that coded a horizontal dash in ASCII (instead of using the HTML Code) for a line to separate paragraphs and did everything ignoring defaults, even having a different color code (subtle different shade of black) for each "-" in the line! This block was repeated many times in the whole document.

Without being intentionally insulting to the Mudcat, I note that there are also examples of similar sort of bloat in the Mudcat, but then it has been generated via a package too, and accesses a database ...

On a really big project, it may be necessary to use such tools, I will say.