Yes. A web browser can't just read a .zip file as a web page. (Even if a web browser decided to try to download, and decompress, and open a GUI file browser, you still just get a list of files to click.) Therefore, far from satisfying the trilemma, it just doesn't work.

And if you fix that, you still generally have a choice between either no longer being single-file or efficiency. (You can just serve a split-up HTML from a single ZIP file with some server-side software, which gets you efficiency, but now it's no longer single-file; and vice-versa. Because if it's a ZIP, how does it stop downloading and only download the parts you need?)

Tar is sequential. Each entry header sits right before its data. If the JSON manifest in the Gwtar preamble says an asset lives at byte offset N with size M, the browser fires one Range request and gets exactly those bytes.

The other problem is decompression. Zip entries are individually deflate-compressed, so you'd need a JS inflate library in the self-extracting header. Tar entries are raw bytes, so the header script just slices at known offsets. No decompression code keeps the preamble small.

If you really just want the text content you could just save markdown using something like https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/llmfeeder/.

As far as I know, we do not have any hash verification beyond that built into TCP/IP or HTTPS etc. I included SHA hashes just to be safe and forward compatible, but they are not checked.

There's something of a question here of what hashes are buying you here and what the threat model is. In terms of archiving, we're often dealing with half-broken web pages (any of whose contents may themselves be broken) which may have gone through a chain of a dozen owners, where we have no possible web of trust to the original creator, assuming there is even one in any meaningful sense, and where our major failure modes tend to be total file loss or partial corruption somewhere during storage. A random JPG flipping a bit during the HTTPS range request download from the most recent server is in many ways the least of our problems in terms of availability and integrity.

This is why I spent a lot more time thinking about how to build FEC in, like with appending PAR2. I'm vastly more concerned about files being corrupted during storage or the chain of transmission or damaged by a server rewriting stuff, and how to recover from that instead of simply saying 'at least one bit changed somewhere along the way; good luck!'. If your connection is flaky and a JPEG doesn't look right, refresh the page. If the only Gwtar of a page that disappeared 20 years ago is missing half a file because a disk sector went bad in a hobbyist's PC 3 mirrors ago, you're SOL without FEC. (And even if you can find another good mirror... Where's your hash for that?)

> Would W3C Web Bundles and HTTP SXG Signed Exchanges solve for this use case?

No idea. It sounds like you know more about them than I do. What threat do they protect against, exactly?

Its almost as if someone charged you $$ for the privilege of reading it, and you now feel scammed, or something?

Perhaps you can request a refund. Would that help?