Quick shout out to the Compiled HTML[0] (.chm) format for similar but unrelated reasons. The Help viewer application was one of the pinnacles of good UX, in my opinion.
A while back at $DAYJOB I tried to get a CI pipeline to bundle our docs as .chm, but the official tooling (hhc, with-or-without Sphinx as a frontend) is windows-only pre-unicode nonsense; the only Linux native chm compiler i found was Halibut (from the author of PuTTY) which has many of its own idiosyncrasies.
Is there any normal-looking way to make a chm from a directory full of html files?
It's kind of impressive that one can still run the same .hta app even on Windows 11 according to the wikipedia article:
> HTAs are dependent on the Trident (MSHTML) browser engine, used by Internet Explorer, but are not dependent on the Internet Explorer application itself. If a user removes Internet Explorer from Windows, via the Control Panel, the MSHTML engine remains and HTAs continue to work. HTAs continue to work in Windows 11 as well.
jimmygrapes|3 years ago
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help
mappu|3 years ago
Is there any normal-looking way to make a chm from a directory full of html files?
mmastrac|3 years ago
rnestler|3 years ago
> HTAs are dependent on the Trident (MSHTML) browser engine, used by Internet Explorer, but are not dependent on the Internet Explorer application itself. If a user removes Internet Explorer from Windows, via the Control Panel, the MSHTML engine remains and HTAs continue to work. HTAs continue to work in Windows 11 as well.