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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

#32
Feels like markdown is token-efficient since its abbreviating HTML tags. Think about a large table. Also, HTML can't be especially rendered inside, say, Neovim, so now interacting with an LLM interface gravitates towards GUIs. Good for accessibility, I guess, there's that. Maybe the need for token efficiency will finally realize my dream of writing Slim[0], or some such, straight to the browser, full native compat.

[0]https://slim-template.github.io/

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#33
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…

Is HTML really that much worse to edit than MD?

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#34
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…

We have been authoring HTML by hand for decades with ease. Text editors are very good at it, and many have commands to auto-wrap, auto-close etc. Reading and writing is simple.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#35

Have we gone full circle? From the invention of HTML to the rebirth of plain text with MD to the rediscovery of HTML anbrhe age of LLM? The facts that this article needs to list the pros of HTML over MD, like inreraction, visual density, etc, is weird to me. Maybe the ahdience is not tech-savvy people but I read it as an unnecessary word salad.

I don’t think so.

It is just realization by author that HTML is also useful tool and MD lacks some stuff.

He didn’t write anything about “now we should stop using MD files”.

It is more like: “I see I can do cool stuff with HTML and found cases where it definitely is right tool for the job”.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you just trying to pretend that Markdown is as rich as HTML and that all the use cases that they described are possible with Markdown?

Markdown was a hype in late 2010s that has cooled down due to chatbots. In turn, chatbots pump up markdown by making it the default output format.

I've felt the opposite. With MD being the preferred planning+documentation output for LLMs, the time of "hype" seems to be now. It seemed just a few years ago that devs hated writing properly formatted markdown.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#37

Have we gone full circle? From the invention of HTML to the rebirth of plain text with MD to the rediscovery of HTML anbrhe age of LLM? The facts that this article needs to list the pros of HTML over MD, like inreraction, visual density, etc, is weird to me. Maybe the ahdience is not tech-savvy people but I read it as an unnecessary word salad.

It feels like a word salad that's been created to hit a word target because it's also LLM generated. Really not worth spending 5-10 minutes reading some "AI" output.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#40
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 suppose that only applies if you constrain yourself to a raw teletypewriter emulator… in any proper coding environment, editing HTML should be absolutely simple - even an embedded WYSIWYG editor would be an option if rich model output is a way we head into.
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