Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why XML tags are so fundamental to Claude

glthr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 160 posts

Re: Why XML tags are so fundamental to Claude

#21

Post by michaelcampbell »

croes wrote: post #16
TheJoeMan wrote: post #2

That first image, “Structure Prompts with XML”, just screams AI-written. The bullet lists don’t line up, the numbering starts at (2), random bolding. Why would anyone trust hallucinated documentation for prompting? At least with AI-generated software documentation, the context is the code itself, being regurgitated into bulleted english. But for instructions on using the LLM itself, it seems pretty lazy to not hand-t…

You just hallucinated the content is AI generated.

"This is AI" is the new "This is 'shopped, I can tell by the pixels."

Re: Why XML tags are so fundamental to Claude

#22

Post by werdnapk »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #19

Total tangent, but what vagary of HTML (or the Brave Browser, which I'm using here) causes words to be split in very odd places? The "inspect" devtools certainly didn't show anything unusual to me. (Edit: Chrome, MS Edge, and Firefox do the same thing. I also notice they're all links; wonder if that has something to do with it.) https://i.imgur.com/HGa0i3m.png

CSS on the tags:

word-break: break-all;

Re: Why XML tags are so fundamental to Claude

#23

Post by ezfe »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #18
apwheele wrote: post #15

I think XML is good to know for prompting (similar to how was popular for outputs, you can do that for other sections). But I have had much better experience just writing JSON and using line breaks, colons, etc. to demarcate sections. E.g. instead of .... ..... .... ... .... {actual input} Just doing something like: ...instructions... input: .... output: {..json here} ...maybe further instructions... input: {actual i…

Could you clarify, do those tags need to be tags which exist and we need to lear about them and how to use them? Or we can put inside them whatever we want and just by virtue of being tags, Claude understands them in a special way?

They probably don’t need to be specific values. The model is fine tuned to see the tags as signals and then interprets them

Re: Why XML tags are so fundamental to Claude

#24

Post by fancy_pantser »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #19

Total tangent, but what vagary of HTML (or the Brave Browser, which I'm using here) causes words to be split in very odd places? The "inspect" devtools certainly didn't show anything unusual to me. (Edit: Chrome, MS Edge, and Firefox do the same thing. I also notice they're all links; wonder if that has something to do with it.) https://i.imgur.com/HGa0i3m.png

CSS word-break property

Re: Why XML tags are so fundamental to Claude

#25

Post by tingletech »

twoodfin wrote: post #20

This isn’t surprising: XML’s core purpose was to simplify SGML for a wider breadth of applications on the web. HTML also descended from SGML, and it’s hard to imagine a more deeply grooved structure in these models, given their training data. So if you want to annotate text with semantics in a way models will understand…

XML and HTML are SGMLs

Re: Why XML tags are so fundamental to Claude

#26

Post by alansaber »

Sounds like as 1. XML is the cleanest/best quality training data (especially compared to PDF/HTML) 2. It follows that a user providing semantic tags in XML format can get best training alignment (hence best results). Shame they haven't quantified this assertion here.

Re: Why XML tags are so fundamental to Claude

#27

Post by apwheele »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #18
apwheele wrote: post #15

I think XML is good to know for prompting (similar to how was popular for outputs, you can do that for other sections). But I have had much better experience just writing JSON and using line breaks, colons, etc. to demarcate sections. E.g. instead of .... ..... .... ... .... {actual input} Just doing something like: ...instructions... input: .... output: {..json here} ...maybe further instructions... input: {actual i…

Could you clarify, do those tags need to be tags which exist and we need to lear about them and how to use them? Or we can put inside them whatever we want and just by virtue of being tags, Claude understands them in a special way?

All the major foundation models will understand them implicitly, so it was popular to use , but you could also use or and the model would still go through the same process.

Re: Why XML tags are so fundamental to Claude

#28

Post by kid64 »

The thesis here seems to be that delimiters provide important context for Claude, and for that putpose we should use XML.

The article even references English's built-in delimiter, the quotation mark, which is reprented as a token for Claude, part of its training data.

So are we sure the lesson isn't simply to leverage delimiters, such as quotation marks, in prompts, period? The article doesn't identify any way in which XML is superior to quotation marks in scenarios requiring the type of disambiguation quotation marks provide.

Rather, the example XML tags shown seem to be serving as a shorthand for notating sections of the prompt ("treat this part of the prompt in this particular way"). That's useful, but seems to be addressing concerns that are separate from those contemplated by the author.

Post reply on HN