I haven't used it in a while, but most browsers allow you to go File->Save, and it'll save everything in a contained folder structure that should be easily zippable. Including all linked images/CSS/JS, with their references fixed for local-consumption.

That is, until requireJS/AMD/angular/react/backbone/etc and those sorts of things started polluting the web. Thanks you JS developers.

This is close, but I'm thinking cut out the web tools part. Do we really have to depend on HTML and CSS (or other XML based format which needs a web browser to view) to make and edit a simple word document? I cringe thinking of the bloat that is introduced when using CSS and javascript to view text+pictures.

Isn't that basically Microsoft's compiled html (chm) files?

MHTML is an archive file of a webpage and its external resources.

The pandoc help section on "--self-contained" indicates that it can mostly handle your use case (minus the compression step).

IIRC Mozilla created such file format, and MS Explorer has its own proprietary version. They didn't caught on, though.