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Comment by MartinMond | Hacker News Reader

Love how we're realizing that .hta was actually incredible. I have fond memories of building my own https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application

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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.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help

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?

I haven't made one in ages, but I have heard Calibre might be able to process CHM and possibly even generate it (cannot confirm).

The only working bookmark I have now that standalone MSDN is basically defunct (RIP, legend) is:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

(might wanna archive before MS redirects it to welcome.microsoft.com or something)

Not sure if that helps but it's all I got!

.hta really had to go through the standardization process to tighten up security. Those things were awesome, but you'd basically be owned immediately.

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.

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