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Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

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Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#131

Post by graemep »

40four wrote: post #127

This article is bringing up a point that I’ve thought about for a long time, even outside of the context of LLMs. It’s very surprising to me HTML never caught on more just as a common document for sharing information outside of a website/ web server. Just something to pass around like we do Word or Excel documents.

1. People do not know its possible

2. It is not designed to work as a single file, and AFAIK there is no universal way to do it.

3. its not as easily editable as Word or Excel to most people.

4. There are alternatives such as PDF.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#132

Post by abanana »

F7F7F7 wrote: post #122
OJFord wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Templated though, not manually writing it out for every blog post say. I think GP means it just has more friction as a writing format than markdown for example.

[flagged]

That incredibly condescending phrase should be banned from HN.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#133

Post by graemep »

laurels-marts wrote: post #63
Jakob wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have been authoring HTML by hand for decades with ease. Text editors are very good at it, and many have commands to auto-wrap, auto-close etc. Reading and writing is simple.

You have been authoring HTML by hand for decades. Not every SWE is a FE dev.

Simple HTML is easy to do. If you just want a document with information and it does not need lots of branding and great aesthetics. That is what you are looking at as an alternative to Markdown.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#134

Post by d0gsg0w00f »

FailMore wrote: post #60

Firstly 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.d…

I really like this idea. The md preview thing is super annoying. However, I was hoping your solution was like a local desktop app thats a dedicated md rendering app, things you've asked for line up in the queue for review. My browser is like a junk drawer, can't be bothered to go hunting in there.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#138

Post by radicalbyte »

tmhrtly wrote: post #21

My 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…

Sorry but what? HTML's really simple, I've been using it for 30 years now. Pretty much everything you need to know to do something useful can be learned in an hour.

I know that it's 2026 and we've spent the last 15 years hiring people into our field who don't understand the hacker mindset but I didn't think that I'd find them here. They would have been ran out pretty quickly.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#140

Post by afavour »

OJFord wrote: post #78
Jakob wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have been authoring HTML by hand for decades with ease. Text editors are very good at it, and many have commands to auto-wrap, auto-close etc. Reading and writing is simple.

Templated though, not manually writing it out for every blog post say. I think GP means it just has more friction as a writing format than markdown for example.

Basic HTML really isn’t a big step up from Markdown though, and no one was complaining about that. In some instances it’s simpler even. I often forget the exact syntax for a table in Markdown, by comparison , and are easy to remember. All of the major parts of Markdown are pretty easy, , , etc etc. It was written with human authorship in mind.

Typing out

for every paragraph is annoying, for sure. But a converter that switches out \r\n\r\n for a new paragraph would be a reasonable middle ground IMO.

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