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Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
51–60 of 308 posts
Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
#52I moved from Markdown to JSON for all spec writing about 9 months ago. Although not HTML, it still has the same benefits. Claude and the other models are just so much more reliable in a structured format like JSON/HTML/XML. The most important thing is that I can run static analysis on a structured format. This is important even for my spec documents. I can write data fields and have static analysis analyze it. For ex…
you can embed JSON objects in a tag if you need to.
Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
#53My concern here is that by gravitating to HTML you lose the ability for a human (you!) to easily co-author the document with the LLM. If it’s just an explainer for your consumption, that’s not a concern - but if it’s a spec sheet for something more complex, I deeply value being able to dive in and edit what is produced for me. With a HTML doc it is much harder to do that than with MD. Now of course you could just rep…
I suppose that only applies if you constrain yourself to a raw teletypewriter emulator… in any proper coding environment, editing HTML should be absolutely simple - even an embedded WYSIWYG editor would be an option if rich model output is a way we head into.
A counter argument would be that all programming languages of the last decades have been plain text based. No other more structured format has ever gained traction even though modern editors could be argued to be able to support that easily. Turns out, it doesn't actually work that way.
Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
#54Or, you could do what I did, and process your markdown using Typst. The result is consistent, beautifully formatted documents, generated from your markdown, with mermaid diagrams.
Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
#55My concern here is that by gravitating to HTML you lose the ability for a human (you!) to easily co-author the document with the LLM. If it’s just an explainer for your consumption, that’s not a concern - but if it’s a spec sheet for something more complex, I deeply value being able to dive in and edit what is produced for me. With a HTML doc it is much harder to do that than with MD. Now of course you could just rep…
Is HTML really that much worse to edit than MD?
Markdown is essentially just syntactic sugar for HTML[0], so yes it was made to be easier to edit than HTML.
Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
#56When exploring a new idea or tool, my go to prompt is ``` In a single index.html, no dependencies, sparse styling, create an app that ``` Even before AI, it's how I built small tools, and there's something lovely about being able to email my friends the tool, and tell them "If you want to make a change, toss it to your LLM!"
Same. When I iterate on a design for a new client, I create a simple index.html with inline CSS and when I'm satisfied with the result I take the file and insert it next to my project template files and just ask the LLM to take the design from index.html and work it in the template files.
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Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
#57> I find it difficult to read a markdown file of more than a hundred lines.
Apologies if I'm slightly demeaning here, but what? Markdown is largely plaintext. Unless the output is completely littered with markdown formatting (specifically, imo, tables and maybe links would be the hardest for a human to parse), is this not just saying "I have a difficult time reading large bodies of text" (which is of course fine - people prefer different ways ingesting information)
From reading the post, this seems like a "I personally prefer more visual, interactive elements in output" rather than "agents using markdown leads for less understandable output", and not at all what I would recommend for the average person to use unless said agent or interface or whatever had an extremely seamless way of displaying the HTML. If I had to open the agents response in a browser every time I wanted anything detailed I would lose my mind.
I've certainly had agents generate more rich visualizations such as through html, but I can't imagine using that as my default.
Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
#58The problem I have with this shift is that you basically give up on writing documentation by hand, not only for you, but for everybody who might want to edit your documentation.
I'm also not convinced that it solves meaningful problems :
> I've found I tend to not actually read more than a 100-line markdown file, and I certainly am not able to get anyone else in my organization to read it. But HTML documents are much easier to read, In my experience, LLMs are not concise when it comes to documentation, so using an easier file format to read because the text is too large sounds to me like solving the wrong problem
> Markdown files are fairly hard to share since most browsers do not render them natively well. Yes, but developers tools (IDE, Git forge) do. What most/some of them don't render natively IS HTML.
Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
#59When exploring a new idea or tool, my go to prompt is ``` In a single index.html, no dependencies, sparse styling, create an app that ``` Even before AI, it's how I built small tools, and there's something lovely about being able to email my friends the tool, and tell them "If you want to make a change, toss it to your LLM!"
This is the way!
It is incredible how far you get with a single HTML-file, containing styles and JS, when building dashboards, small apps and other utilities that can interact with an API or otherwise fetch data from somwhere.
I just drop it on my personal ~ folder on the shared server at work and voilà, everyone can check it out and use it immediately!
Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
#60Firstly I think this is a super interesting approach to a real problem. I think it offers a lot. I wonder about frustrations around consistency etc though. Have you had any?
I have been building a slightly different solution to the same problem. So far I’m pretty happy with the results and I have enough returning users that I think others are too (https://sdocs.dev/analytics).
I’ve built SmallDocs (https://sdocs.dev; Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633).
SDocs is cli (`sdoc file.md`) -> instantly rendered Markdown file in the browser
When you install the cli it gives you the option to add a note in your base agent file (`~/.claude/CLAUDE.md`, etc.). This means every agent chat knows about SDocs and you can say “sdoc me the plan when you’re done with it” and the file will pop open instead of you having to find that terminal session to know it’s done.
Going browser first means you’re not required to install anything to get a great experience.
Despite being in the browser, the content of SDocs rendered Markdown files remain entirely local to you. SDoc urls contain your markdown document's content in compressed base64 in the url fragment (the bit after the `#`):
https://sdocs.dev/#md=GzcFAMT...(this is the contents of your document)...
The url fragment is never sent to the server (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F...: "The fragment is not sent to the server when the URI is requested; it is processed by the client").
The sdocs.dev webapp is purely a client side decoding and rendering engine for the content stored in the url fragment.
This also means you can share your .md files privately by sharing the url.
To go a bit deeper towards the HTML side of things I’ve added tagged code blocks that the agent is given documentation on how to use. Eg ```chart or ```mermaid (for mermaid diagrams). These then become interactive elements on the page (mermaid is best example of this currently)