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- Hacker News
- "With HTML, as long as you upload the file (for example to S3), you can share the link easily. Your colleagues can open it wherever they wish and easily reference it."
You don't have to host html files. You can just email it and any browser can view it.
by jdjdjdjdjd - Heck, these days the email is the HTML
- Or just ask Claude to find a connector to share htmlby kwerk
- I’ve been prompting my way to all kinds of interactive HTML artifacts the last month or so. It’s way more fun than making decks and static documentation.
I even did a workshop with PartyKit cursors, dot voting, reflection comments, and an individual rating at the end.
Oh, and I can add super lightweight analytics so I know who actually reads my things or interacts with my prototypes. ^_^
by ar_turnbull - Blog post plzby estetlinus
- > I’ve started preferring HTML as an output format instead of Markdown and increasingly see this being used by others on the Claude Code team, this is why.
This is why I read long agent output either by using VIM and MacOS Quicklook (with a markdown extension for rendering) or paste output into MarkEdit (an editor with a preview pane; I think it’s cross platform?). Worst case, have an agent build you a simple local web page that interprets Markdown and renders it. Markdown was invented as a shorthand for web syntax[0]. That’s what it’s for! I bet you spend more tokens and time asking an agent to convert its native markdown to html than any of these.
by alsetmusic - Which Quick Look extension? I've been looking for a good one.by AndrewSwift
- If you want to be vibe all the way, why don't you ask a bot to summarize the long output?
Using bots has been insane and self-referrential.
by jason1cho - While I agree it probably uses more tokens, the author works for Anthropic and has probably never paid for a tokenby walthamstow
- I've been advocating heavily this approach since January for non-coding use. The important property is an editable, understandable (by LLMs and humans), and renderable source-of-truth that can be incrementally modified.
I talk to laypeople about their AI work -- I am constantly doing this, inserting myself into AI conversations on the street like an anthropologist when I encounter them...
HTML artifacts are the new browser URL bar, wherein some users have a mental model that that bar is actually Google.
Many people now talk about their "spreadsheet" or their "presentation" or "marketing tear sheet", or "slide show", "competitive analysis", "hvac system diagram" or whatever the thing they were working on and how lame it was working with ChatGPT or Claude Web.... and how miraculous Claude Code or OpenClaw is with creating these new documents...
I will ask them what the documents actually are and what the difference in experience was. It takes a lot of teasing (because they don't have the computing vocabulary yet) or having them show me, and it will always come down to that the artifact is HTML.
Their pleasant experience is that it is iterating on an HTML file (+CSS +images) living on a filesystem with high quality instant rendering; plus it can sprinkle JavaScript when it needs to. It might even revision control it without them knowing if there's a git system. [I suggest they checkpoint their work if they don't; revision control is the next stage of learning for the laypeople?]
Whereas the Web-embedded experiences are stabbing multiple times on a DOCX/PPTX/XLSX lingering in a context window and a vague notion of local storage (rendered as HTML anyway in a sidebar), etc. The HTML workflow also allows other media to be integrated much more easily.
So really all this presentation work is Vibe-Coding by the masses; they don't need to know about all the turtles underneath them. But if they are willing, they could crack it open and see and edit it; or easily hand it off to another agent.
Go figure that the system created for collaborative multimedia communication ends up being useful for the machine intelligence to help us communicate.
by neomantra - 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
- I think MDX is the perfect middle ground. I'm gonna start using it instead of plain Markdown thanks to this comment. Thanks!!by salomonk_mur
- 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 - orgdown is better than markdown which is better than markup, except the text ain't hyper. i've been working on this since feb & have reached xanaduby kang
- 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 - You should never have to preview a markdown document, in my opinion. At that point, just make an HTML document.by the_gipsy
- 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 - Second this. If the point of HTML is to have a lot more visuals, then it also means that you will need quite a lot of CSS and JS to make it so. That must mean more tokens.
But, on the other hand. That could be a trade worth taking. Co-working with claude to create a pretty big plan for a rewrite (i know, i know), and showing it to the team is a lot easier in HTML compared to md.
For me, this is just another tool in the toolbox. Doesn't need to be black and white. html or md. Can be both.
by gogoro - It’s a little less efficient but there’s not a huge difference unless lots of it is structural or visual.
What’s harder than with markdown about precise feedback? You can have ids, sections and more with tags.
by IanCal - Also there’s a wider code execution vulnerability for HTML. Plaintext would never hurt you.by mock-possum
- 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 - Wait so when u navigate to a different page/tab the url wouldn’t update?
- I think one of the greatest issues of the last generation of developers is that they never learned about links. They think `div onclick` is equivalent. It pains me that `a` makes up 50% of the HTML acronym but devs don't use it.
I bet that LLMs will actually help generate real links going forward.
by halapro - 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 - Don't get me started on the "templating" for Twitter Articles, it doesn't even support markdown...by danieldisu
- https://thariqs.github.io/html-effectiveness/
I guess it’s both
by bonsai_spool - 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 - I recommend allowing AI to use TailwindCSS and Alpine in the context, as this would generate great lightweight dynamic web pages.by djyde
- 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.by mcintyre1994
- My manager does this and with a straight face comes to me after with it and goes “put this in production” and wonders why it takes more than 5 minutes.
I absolutely hate the absolute rot these tools have caused to people’s brains.