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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

#231

Post by js8 »

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…

I don't think human coauthoring documents with AI is viable, due to very different costs. It's like with combining hand-written assembler and compiler output. I think ideally there will be some delineation which parts of the document are human-produced and which are AI-produced.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#233

Post by fuglede_ »

I've reached for this solution many times too; it's certainly convenient.

What I don't like is that all the resulting pages look the same. It's so easy to tell when a page is authored by Claude, and by now, I get the same “ugh another one” feeling as Dall-E generated images would give when they were completely overdone.

Maybe it's just be, but if not, maybe HTML generated outputs will also end up being dialed down from where they're at now.

But maybe not, since it's obviously a useful thing to be able to do. I wonder if there's a way out. To be able to introduce some natural entropy so not everything ends up looking the same. I guess not, since we're using machines whose natural mode of behavior is regression toward the mean. And maybe having it be harder to tell the author wouldn't even be desirable anyway.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#236

Post by TedDallas »

I had created my own chat tool that can render html responses directly in the chat interface, if needed. It is very handy for when I am needing rich(er) responses dealing for mathematical expressions. But it burns more tokens. It is useful, but I don’t need it for coding.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#237

Post by ehsanu1 »

readitalready wrote: post #172
yokoprime wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is super interesting, but i think you and the OP is talking about two different problems: presenting text to end users and structuring text for agents

This flow is really for LLM consumption, since Markdown spec documents are for LLMs anyways. And you can always write a JSON-to-markdown converter for human use (actually, LLMs remember Markdown content better than JSON, so you should use that in your flow a well). The real change is in generation side, and now the spec docs are LLM generated JSON based on other spec docs or human prompts. LLMs seem to write JSON bet…

For my schemas, I found LLMs really wanted to just use markdown embedded in the strings, so I've been considering doing away with the schema. I also figure that embedding markdown in a string may make it perform worse as it has to juggle nested formats, and thus escaping and such (wanted: eval for this). By replacing the json tool call with basic markdown extraction, I'd lose some structured data but gain flexibility (html would be even more flexible).

Wondering if you are referring to adherence to required data in a schema when you say LLMs do better with json vs markdown, or something else? Or perhaps to tool calls and/or strict json output being more reliably formatted for clean extraction?

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#238

Post by mcintyre1994 »

momojo wrote: 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!"

This is also what Claude does on web when you ask for html (it creates it as an artifact), so the model is probably really well trained for it.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#240

Post by austin-cheney »

embedding-shape wrote: post #185
austin-cheney wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 themsel…

I suspect this unintentionally satisfies my conclusion.
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