Comment by jokoon

Microsoft already has the .chm format, so there might be a patent, but I'm no expert. I don't really know how their format works though. It might be compiled as in "obfuscated".

But I don't think there's any existing, open format like that. Plain text html has the advantage of being easily diagnosed and immediatly readable, but you could easily make a binary format decompilable. I guess most programmers prefer having plain text because it's right before their eyes, it also sort of is "open", but that's not what open source really means.

It's not a new idea, but when I think about it, compiled html is a good solution to speed up web browsers. Now the .CHM format is not what you would want, as it's more targeted towards documentation, and is not extensible with CSS like html is now. It's an abandoned format I guess. Lighter than PDF I think.

By the way, when I say compiled HTML, I mean a binary version of a webpage that is already parsed. Would be a tree structured file. The goal is to remove the parsing phase.

But indeed, that could be a good opportunity for big tech firms to push that format. As long as it's open it might be a big success.