I don't see why I can't deflate the tables as javascript data and then use JS to inflate and display them.
Just playing around with it I was able to compress a 120MB HTML file to 3.5MB.
If you are worried about the CPU cost of the compression and added request latency, you can pre-compress static content with most modern web servers (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/75482/how-can-i-pre-compr... for Apache info).
There are only local HTML files that are checked in to revision control and shipped alongside releases.
HTML was chosen as the documentation file format because it's easy to find something to view it with.
General compression can get much better results than content translation. Check mod_deflate, mod_gzip, or what-ever your preferred web server's equivalent is (all modern servers aside from those designed to be absolutely minimal (for embedded systems and such) have one).