Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Have been working with HTML in decades and still it's quicker to write markdown for simple documents. Now if you'd have some middle ground that would be nice. And actually there are already things like Githubs Markdown which has more features, you can embed mermaid etc. Or you'd use something like MDX (which readme.com is using internally) where you mix in components when needed - those could even be based on something like bootstrap because you might like having cards and layouts. Now the only thing missing is support in the interface. Plain HTML can already be rendered, adding a more capable Markdown shouldn't be too hard.by nedt
- For similar reasons, I strongly prefer org-mode to markdown. I find that with org-mode and extensions (such as in-line elisp) I have a _significantly_ more powerful system. For example, specs can have tasks and roadmaps inline which reduces risk of drift. The biggest downside is, unfortunately, not enough folks are emacs proficient.
I hadn't considered HTML and I'm definitely going to try this.
by jaaron - Both the original Markdown spec [1] as well as CommonMark [2] clearly specify support for inline HTML. With that you can kind of get the best of both words depending on your use case.
For the most parts you just write the regular Markdown headers and paragraphs, embed images, insert tables etc without the need for any HTML tags, making it readable in source form. And if you want to embed an SVG file for example, which the author of the article mentions as one use case, you just embed the SVG directly, and people can render the Markdown in their favorite viewer.
Let's say you're viewing a raw Markdown file in VS Code. You come onto an HTML tag, so you hit Cmd+Shift+V to open the preview and that's it.
Of course for full-fledged web pages with interactive buttons and fully customized styling and all of that, which the author shows in some examples, this is not feasible. But you can get very far when you have mostly text/images/tables and just want to add some extras here and there.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html
by PhilippGille - A couple of tradeoffs I don't see mentioned here for HTML vs MD: - HTML is significantly less token-efficient - Difficult to provide precise feedback on plans HTML, much easier to do this in MD.
Both of these tradeoffs set Anthropic up for success. Using HTML as our medium will increase token usage, and I'd bet they're investing in tools to mark up HTML (part of Claude Design) which will help improve lock-in. Either coincidence or brilliant strategy.
by ryandsilva - Web technologies got so many things right. People complain about it so much but it's amazing.
I worked with a vibe coded app at my last job (and since quit due to it) and because it was a nextjs SPA frontend with a separate API backend, the user facing urls didn't match the backend endpoints. Because AI uses react hooks for everything, state is in-memory, url-based routing isn't a thing unless you design for it. So links aren't free and thus we have no way for users to link to anything other than top-level entry points. LINKS! Especially for internal tools, everything being linkable is vital to collaboration and problem solving.
The need for uniform resource locations and verbs was so well thought out, 30 or 40 some odd years ago.
by apsurd - The irony of this being a Twitter post with pictures of html rendering instead of an interactive html page is not lost on me.
Arguing for html on a platform with less rich semantics than markdown is just ultimately funny
by arianvanp - 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 <idea> ```
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!"
by momojo - 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 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.
If this pattern becomes more common I suspect human/LLM co-creation will further dwindle in favour of just delegating voice, tone and content choice to the LLM. I was surprised not to see this concern in the blog post’s FAQ.
by tmhrtly