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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

#281

Post by onion2k »

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…

Now of course you could just reprompt your LLM to change the HTML - but when I already have a clear idea of what I want to say in my head, that’s just another roadblock in the way.

It's usually faster though, so you get to spend more time on thinking.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#283

Post by jwr »

phren0logy wrote: post #159
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/

No, I built my own pipeline using pandoc+Typst. Works great.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#285

Post by victorbjorklund »

coldtea wrote: post #144
victorbjorklund wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hand on heart. When was the last time you built a serious production system for a real business that was 100% built from HTML without using any build step? Just editing the footer and header in every file when it updates (or using iframes)

LLMs aside, when was the last time you wrote React/JSX and didn't write a subset of HTML by hand in them?

That is the point. No one writes HTML without any abstractions anymore. You use a framework or a build tool. Because just editing pure html files is a pain in the ass. Probably haven’t done that since 2010.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#286

Post by sevenseacat »

trollbridge wrote: post #186
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…

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

I have heard people say prompting via JSON is much more deterministic lol

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#287

Post by sevenseacat »

djyde wrote: post #252
djyde wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend allowing AI to use TailwindCSS and Alpine in the context, as this would generate great lightweight dynamic web pages.

I don't know why my comment was down voted. Can someone tell me why?

because the original prompt specifically said no dependencies, and now you've introduced two dependencies.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#288

Post by dkersten »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #87
dkersten wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people edit documents in Microsoft word, though, so it didn’t seem too far fetched that LLM content would be edited similarly, especially as more and more non-programmers use it.

MS Word uses HTML under the hood, right? (Or some SGML at least.)

It was less a comment about the format and more a comment about the application used to do the editing.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#289

Post by Jakob »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #121
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After you a FE webdev that doesn't regularly author HTML by hand?

Hand on heart. When was the last time you built a serious production system for a real business that was 100% built from HTML without using any build step? Just editing the footer and header in every file when it updates (or using iframes)

Maybe not in your corner of the internet, but businesses used server side includes (SSI) for that, not iframes.

You add “include” tags to your HTML file and your web server like nginx or varnish would replace it with the fragment at runtime.
I saw this was quite popular for big publishing houses with millions of articles still relatively recently 10 years ago. They would only write the HTML body of a new article and the other fragments would be included by the web server.

Very cheap, stable, and very big changes across the whole website could be done instantly since cache invalidation is trivial (the web server knows all modified dates of all fragments).

Also, no additional CDN or caching needed. Later, with CDNs there was even a variant where these fragments were hosted at the edge (ESI).

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#290

Post by realrocker »

jedimastert wrote: post #168
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…

Markdown supports inline HTML for interactive elements, I think an interesting potential alternative would be an md doc with a known HTML template and simple build (e.g. single line pandoc command).

that’s exactly the core value proposition of the tool I have been working on : https://github.com/livetemplate/tinkerdown
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