On: Closing a 30 pixel gap between native and web

[MartinMond]

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

[jimmygrapes → MartinMond]

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

[mappu → jimmygrapes]

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?

[jimmygrapes → mappu]

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!

[mmastrac → MartinMond]

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

[rnestler → MartinMond]

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.