> There's no straightfoward, standard way to read an html document on another platform.
Such as? What doesn’t have a browser but can render pdfs?
Such as? What doesn’t have a browser but can render pdfs?
We could have such a format if browser and os vendors were interested in supporting such a use case. Unfortunately, they aren't.
On the browser side, supporting all-in-one html files can be as simple a reading a single multipart-encoded page. Heck, if they support automatically serializing all external resources as datauris when saving pages, then most browsers will be able to open them without any modification.
On the OS side, operating systems can treat html files as first class citizens; execute them in an offline sandbox (most operating systems have embedded webviews), then extract icon, title, description and other metadata to present to the user. An icon the consists of a blank page with a small browser icon in the corner doesn't tell me anything about what the page is about. This needs to change.
In short, html can be easily made nicer to deal with locally thanks to all the parts already being in place. The problem is that no one (tech giants, os vendors) are interested in doing this.
Ctrl/Meta/Cmd + S should do the trick, or "File > Save page", and you get a HTML file you can open in any browser. If there is images, they'll most likely be loaded remotely, or worst case not load at all. But the rest of the structure is there.
Most sites have images as a relative path which won't work with saved html and there is also CSS.