A 50-page PDF loads a lot faster and shows a lot smoother than an HTML of equal textual length. And I've never seen any modern tools that turn TeX into multifile HTML (one per section).
> A 50-page PDF loads a lot faster and shows a lot smoother than an HTML of equal textual length.
Very true! Although they are now comparable, if you rely on the browser native MathML instead of MathJax/LaTeX.
(You can test this on long arXiv HTML papers, e.g. https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1710.07304 is more than 60 pages as PDF. Mind you, the ar5iv default CSS is not great. I would use Latin Modern for formulas, at the very least.)
> I've never seen any modern tools that turn TeX into multifile HTML (one per section).
I believe all of them can do it out of the box now. I know for sure that LaTeXML, tex4ht and lwarp can split by chapter or section.
