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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

#151

Post by FailMore »

d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #134
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.

Interesting point. If you have any ideas how SmallDocs could be both let me know…!

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#152

Post by Zetaphor »

F7F7F7 wrote: post #126
manmal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that’s the case. And as Anthropic staff, author has an incentive to promote workflows that require an agent to interact with text documents.

HTML is by far simpler than Markdown.

By what measure? HTML as they're describing it here includes CSS and presumably Javascript. Markdown has only a handful of elements and they're all more human readable in their unrendered form. Show both to someone who has never seen either and it's obvious which they would describe as "simpler".

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#153

Post by abdusco »

dheera wrote: post #111
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…

HTML is super human readable if you stick to a subset of it. It's arguable even more readable. bold italic underline I can never remember how many stars and ticks correspond to what in markdown.

Most editors format and highlight markdown syntax as bold, italic or strike through, but I have never seen the same thing for html. They only highlight the html-specific parts leaving the content unstyled.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#154

Post by rubslopes »

4k0hz wrote: post #33
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…

Is HTML really that much worse to edit than MD?

Yes, I do think it is.

HTML made by Claude will, by default, be "sleek, modern", with colorful tables, cards, maybe Tailwind for styling. And, of course it will, if you wanted a barebones HTML, you would just have asked for markdown!

So the LLM decided to present some content using 4 cards, and you now want to add new itens. You can't just add new lines of text: you need to copy the whole HTML of the cards. But the LLM used different colors for each card, so now you have the first cards with varying colors and the new cards all the same color as the last card. Now you have to think about colors... etc etc

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#155

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

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…

Why is it a problem if co-authoring the document is a touch more difficult?

The same could be said of any proprietary file format (which HTML is not!) Designers aren't concerned when they create inside a .psd or .ai file.

This feels very similar IMO.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#156

Post by tdeck »

dheera wrote: post #111
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…

HTML is super human readable if you stick to a subset of it. It's arguable even more readable. bold italic underline I can never remember how many stars and ticks correspond to what in markdown.

Oddly enoght those are now called the "bring attention to" element [1], the "idiomatic text" lement [2], and the "unarticulated annotation" element.

1: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

2: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

3: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#157

Post by nedt »

Have been working with HTML in decades and still it's quicker to write markdown for simple documents. Now if you'd have some middle ground that would be nice. And actually there are already things like Githubs Markdown which has more features, you can embed mermaid etc. Or you'd use something like MDX (which readme.com is using internally) where you mix in components when needed - those could even be based on something like bootstrap because you might like having cards and layouts. Now the only thing missing is support in the interface. Plain HTML can already be rendered, adding a more capable Markdown shouldn't be too hard.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#159

Post by phren0logy »

jwr wrote: post #54

Or, 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.

Are you using that cmarker commonmark Typst package? Is it good?

https://typst.app/universe/package/cmarker/

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