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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

#301

Post by ramoz »

I’ve done a lot of exploration here.

Visual explainers certainly come in hand. You need to have both the extra time and cost of tokens accounted for when you ask for these. As well as maintainability - you lose things like vcs/diffs over plans that are much more readable as markdown.

The more interactivity on the surface, the better. Esp if they create feedback loops with the agent. Simple annotations to start.

Markdown still goes a long way. I’ve effectively been enriching plan rendering in Plannotator. Now supporting GFM, custom svgs, etc.

https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator

For fun, I also enabled annotations on top of these type of svgs, see here https://x.com/plannotator/status/2052851731998941380?s=46

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#302

Post by jesgran »

readitalready wrote: post #41

I moved from Markdown to JSON for all spec writing about 9 months ago. Although not HTML, it still has the same benefits. Claude and the other models are just so much more reliable in a structured format like JSON/HTML/XML. The most important thing is that I can run static analysis on a structured format. This is important even for my spec documents. I can write data fields and have static analysis analyze it. For ex…

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Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#303

Post by wek »

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…

Well said. It is so much better for when the human can see what the LLM has changed and iterate on it with the LLM, making their own changes. Markdown is better for that.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#307

Post by 40four »

graemep wrote: post #131
40four wrote: post #127

This article is bringing up a point that I’ve thought about for a long time, even outside of the context of LLMs. It’s very surprising to me HTML never caught on more just as a common document for sharing information outside of a website/ web server. Just something to pass around like we do Word or Excel documents.

1. People do not know its possible 2. It is not designed to work as a single file, and AFAIK there is no universal way to do it. 3. its not as easily editable as Word or Excel to most people. 4. There are alternatives such as PDF.

#1 and #3 are big ones for sure and related. That has to do with most people aren’t developers & don’t code. I get that’s the biggest reason it’s not common. I’m just saying even among developers, I would think it would be a little more common. You can obviously do so much more with it than PDF, it opens a lot of interesting options. I don’t think #2 is a concern at all. The “universal” way to do it is double clicking the file :) every computer in the world will open an HTML document in the default browser (not the case on mobile though).
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