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Serve Markdown to AI Agents with Accept Headers

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11–20 of 99 posts

Re: Serve Markdown to AI Agents with Accept Headers

#11
I'll do that once any of the top 4 AI chatbots says they'll start making requests with this header. Before that it's just a neat idea with no adoption.

I also think it's exceedingly unlikely that any of the top 4 chatbots would choose to load websites this way. Too many risks for a 0.01% adoption even years later.

Re: Serve Markdown to AI Agents with Accept Headers

#12
post #6

hoping for this to get mainstream so that I can just view the pages without any ads, js and bloat

Markdown ads?

Time magazine already serves their pages like this to agents with ads for the agents in them, IIRC.

Re: Serve Markdown to AI Agents with Accept Headers

#14
post #10

Hm, interesting avenue for prompt injection.

How is that different from today where agents just do searches and ingest web pages?

I don’t disagree with you in principle but there is a difference.

The MD content isn’t intended for human consumption whereas HTML is. So you either have that injection readable to your users, which could be jarring to non-technical readers, or you play the cat-and-mouse game of hoping those pesky crawlers don’t ignore text that’s not human-visible on a rendered page.

Re: Serve Markdown to AI Agents with Accept Headers

#15
post #8

hoping for this to get mainstream so that I can just view the pages without any ads, js and bloat

> But imagine for a second they did do that. You get the API, all the info is there. > Why do you need AI then? (from this HN comment, worth a read in full: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43679585 )

> Let's say you want to plan a trip to Thailand with your family. You could use the fancy AI to do it for you, or you could build a stupid frontend with minimal natural language understanding.

It's giving https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863#9224

Re: Serve Markdown to AI Agents with Accept Headers

#17
post #14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different from today where agents just do searches and ingest web pages?

I don’t disagree with you in principle but there is a difference. The MD content isn’t intended for human consumption whereas HTML is. So you either have that injection readable to your users, which could be jarring to non-technical readers, or you play the cat-and-mouse game of hoping those pesky crawlers don’t ignore text that’s not human-visible on a rendered page.

Right. And today we have something similar with search engines going on where sites want to offer the full text to the engine for seo. But maybe they want to do the opposite to agent and poison the well. So human agents still get the “real” data and agents the “something plausible but not quite right” data.

Or everything just disappears behind something like cloudflare or a paywall.

Re: Serve Markdown to AI Agents with Accept Headers

#18
Interesting...

A cherry.jpg image/jpeg file is shown as an image by the browser

A logo in svg like https://news.ycombinator.com/y18.svg too

So browsers should show readme.md as text/markdown and clicking on a link inside that file should also redirect to another markdown file, instant wiki

Browsers should implement that asap and we will follow

Re: Serve Markdown to AI Agents with Accept Headers

#19
What about clean, semantic HTML?

It was already optimized for bots and search engines (which are bots) and it has been used for decades. Why we need to serve in markdown now?

There are also many parts of the HTML, like navs, that are useful for bots and AI and may be removed in the markdown version.

Re: Serve Markdown to AI Agents with Accept Headers

#20

What about clean, semantic HTML? It was already optimized for bots and search engines (which are bots) and it has been used for decades. Why we need to serve in markdown now? There are also many parts of the HTML, like navs, that are useful for bots and AI and may be removed in the markdown version.

Presumably markdown uses far fewer tokens.
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