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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

#181
The author is completely missing the point of markdown.

"HTML can convey much richer information compared to markdown. It can of course do simple document structure like headers and formatting, but it can also represent all sorts of other information"

Yes exactly, and markdown is used when someone wants to just have raw text.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#183
Let’s be fair, about half of these things are provided by markdown as well:

> Tabular data using tables yes > Illustrations with SVG yes > Code snippets with script tags yes > Workflows using SVG and HTML svgs yes > Images using image tags yes > Design data with CSS no > Interactions using HTML elements with javascript + CSS no > Spatial data using absolute positions and canvases no, although svgs help

That said, I can kinda get behind this ‘html, not markdown’ idea - as much as I like keeping things lean and mean, and markdown is ‘just enough’ semantics and style on top of plaintext… it can admittedly be more useful to recieve a more flavorful writeup from an LLM, if it’s going to be a piece that really requires you to engage with it, rather than just a quick read. Certainly a better fit for reports.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern JS/TS devs probably not, but I wouldn't even call someone a "frontend dev" if you don't know HTML, kind of being a infrastructure engineer and not knowing how any OSes work.

It’s not just knowing HTML as in writing a bunch div tags and patting yourself on the back. If you aren’t able to achieve at least 80% WCAG AA compliance you can’t write HTML. Most frontend devs have no idea what any of that means. But then it seems everyone who can write 3 lines of code professionally refers to themselves as an ”engineer” .

Yes, it's literally about being able to use HTML effectively and knowing what you are doing, then you know HTML. I'm not sure why you bring up some arbitrary accessibility guidelines, that has no bearing if someone is using HTML correctly and neither would I gatekeep the "frontend" label on some arbitrary "must pass this particular standard", never heard something so outlandish when it comes to who could call themselves frontend developer or not.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#186
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…

Next up after HTML: someone rediscovers programming languages and comes up with the idea to use them to prompt agents.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#187
post #12

When 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 - and always had been, really, even before LLM codegen. Always try it out in the smallest quickest simplest case first! You can always make it bigger and more complicated later.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#189
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we’re not even dealing with a programming language in any classical sense here. Interacting with an LLM coding system is a multi-mode communication system with on-demand, purpose-generated ephemeral UI. That doesn’t fit any of the established categories, so I think carrying over constraints from them doesn’t make sense either.

> with on-demand, purpose-generated ephemeral UI Nope, it's a fixed, coded and shipped UI: the agent TUI.

Even Claude Code can whip up interactive, tabbed, multiple choice questions for example. If you use the superpowers plugin, it'll sometimes spawn a small web server demoing UI concepts or previewing more complex choices using LLM-generated HTML. Claude Code on the web will do even more involved React apps on the fly next to the chat. There's no technical reasons this couldn't get more complex, or vertically integrated with code editors.

I'd definitely call that on-demand, purpose-generated ephemeral UI.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#190
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 isn't difficult to read or edit by hand, non-technical people did it for years before the web became commoditized and generating everything with javascript became the standard. It's more awkward than Markdown, yes, but basically simple.
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