You know how some "books" are published as a folder full of HTML files with an index.html at the root of that set of folders? That makes for a heck of of a lot of files that are really compressible, just sitting there on your hard drive uncompressed. This is necessary because browsers can't see into .ZIP files. Well, I say, why the heck not? The compression algorithms seem to be everywhere except in the browsers. We could zip up a folder full of HTML files (and their accompanying images, etc.), give it an extension like htmlzip, and then just point the browser to that file. It would open the index.html file by default and there you go. An HTML book all in one file simply by zipping it up and changing the extension.
I know there are programs that will convert a set of HTML files to a .chm help file and various other things. But these are often proprietary and platform specific. This would provide a completely open, cross-platform, and really convenient way to do the same thing.
The contents of this post is Copyright © 2009 by Grant Sheridan Robertson.
However, anyone is welcome to incorporate this idea into their browser. In fact, please do. Thanks.
A few years after posting this I learned about the EPUB3 format, which does exactly this.
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