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Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

• ale 5mo ago
  After Thariq's infamous "our react TUI is actually a game engine" tweet i can't help but smirk at these headlines and wonder if it's satire or not.
• tukHelix 5mo ago
  [dead]
• koolala 5mo ago
  The unreasonable effectiveness of HtmlX.
• BretonForearm 5mo ago
  Many of us had CC routinely generate HTML ever since it became available. Surprised that it's presented as some kind of novelty.
  • drob518 5mo ago
    I don’t think the idea of generating HTML is a novelty. Anyone using an LLM to create a web app has done that. Any “novelty” here is the idea of favoring HTML rather than Markdown for internal docs like specs, design docs, etc. Maybe you were already doing that. I sure haven’t been. In hindsight it’s obvious that it would be useful in some circumstances. Previously, I’ve had a bias against HTML because it’s annoying to read in a text editor.
    • BretonForearm 5mo ago
      Yes, I meant internal docs, in line with the topic at hand.
• apsurd 5mo ago
  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.
  • laurels-marts 5mo ago
    Wait so when u navigate to a different page/tab the url wouldn’t update?
    • apsurd 5mo ago
      it does, it's a nextjs app so there's a bunch of top level pages that work as you'd expect. The issue is that we're trying to be a real company, those pages have nested logic, multiple views, sub navigation, search, filtering, wizards, all of which are in a cascade of react hooks because AI is obsessed with self-contained hooks. none of that state is linkable. What i learned, by fire, is that nextjs works well with its nested routing and layout-to-hold-context magic. it's quite nifty but it's not free and not obvious, you have to design for it. I can't state enough that AI will ship a billion hooks, it loves hooks for self-contained state. My colleague made a good point that that style is a feature; it limits blast radius of N features all building on top of each other. Yeah i had to move on from there.
  • chandima98 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  • halapro 5mo ago
    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.
• kulikalov 5mo ago
  Md and plotly is all you need. The only thing that is truly missing is some sort of Markdown-based forms
• gabesullice 5mo ago
  It's been confusing to me that so many people have treated markdown as the lingua franca for agent instructions when their training corpus must be dramatically biased to HTML instead of Mardown. Markdown only makes sense for us meatbags becuse it's easy for us to edit and version control, but if you're sharing anything where the audience is an agent publicly, HTML must be just as interpretable.
• jdw64 5mo ago
  [dead]
• Barbing 5mo ago
  (Edit) nvm, the usual Xcancel (https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2052809885763747935 https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2052809885763747935) just links to an article (http://x.com/i/article/2052796100608974848 http://x.com/i/article/2052796100608974848)
• ar_turnbull 5mo ago
  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. ^_^
  • estetlinus 5mo ago
    Blog post plz
    • alt227 5mo ago
      Just copy and paste the parent post into $yourFavouriteLLM and ask it to make a blog post for you to read about it. No need to ask the author to do more work than is necessary /s
• alsetmusic 5mo ago
  > 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. 0. https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
  • jason1cho 5mo ago
    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.
  • walthamstow 5mo ago
    While I agree it probably uses more tokens, the author works for Anthropic and has probably never paid for a token
  • AndrewSwift 5mo ago
    Which Quick Look extension? I've been looking for a good one.
    • eddyg 5mo ago
      https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins lists some good ones. (I still use Peek.)
• 2001zhaozhao 5mo ago
  I'm thinking of adding support for GitHub-flavored markdown (including things like Mermaid diagrams) in my agent wrapper tool and then adding something like a skill for Claude Code to always write GitHub-flavored markdown and use its features when communicating with me. Seems a lot better than general Markdown. Though now I'm wondering: why not just add full HTML embedding support as well? I'm talking not just for specific deliverables, but for any of the agent's responses with the user.
• momojo 5mo ago
  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!"
  • drob518 5mo ago
    I never really thought about this use case before, and I feel a bit dumb because of that. It’s so obvious that it would be useful. My focus with LLMs so far has been on The App, not all the ancillary stuff around The App. All that ancillary stuff doesn’t have to be fully complete or polished and doesn’t have to handle every possible case. It just needs to be functional enough to be useful. When you’re done with it, throw it away and generate a new one tomorrow.
  • l3x4ur1n 5mo ago
    Same. When I iterate on a design for a new client, I create a simple index.html with inline CSS and when I'm satisfied with the result I take the file and insert it next to my project template files and just ask the LLM to take the design from index.html and work it in the template files.
    • Hasbaranews 5mo ago
      [flagged]
  • rsolva 5mo ago
    This is the way! It is incredible how far you get with a single HTML-file, containing styles and JS, when building dashboards, small apps and other utilities that can interact with an API or otherwise fetch data from somwhere. I just drop it on my personal ~ folder on the shared server at work and voilà, everyone can check it out and use it immediately!
    • momojo 5mo ago
      And you get sandboxxing for free! My company got tailscale recently, and its just the final cherry on top: `tailscale serve` my `/tools`, and I don't even have to worry about auth!
• postalcoder 5mo ago
  Yeah, I agree with this. I've been doing the same thing. Whenever I have to do a review, I ask the llm to create a dashboard. It's a godsend for reducing cognitive burden. I think the reason stuff like this wasn't done earlier was due to fears about context pollution, but post training has gotten so good that you can do virtually anything in the context window and not have it affect the quality of output.
• whatever1 5mo ago
  Do we have local first html renderers that don’t complain about cors and wrong file addresses? I don’t want to spin up a server just to open an HTML file
• jaaron 5mo ago
  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.
  • kang 5mo ago
    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 xanadu
• realrocker 5mo ago
  I am working on https://github.com/livetemplate/tinkerdown https://github.com/livetemplate/tinkerdown to leverage the the two effective outputs of LLMs : html and markdown . Still WIP
• Kwpolska 5mo ago
  I guess the author has never heard of Markdown editors with a preview feature, and doesn't know that the Claude Code VS Code plugin opens plans in preview mode.
  • weird-eye-issue 5mo ago
    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?
    • jason1cho 5mo ago
      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.
      • k4rli 5mo ago
        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.
      • albedoa 5mo ago
        > has cooled down due to chatbots. What in the world.
    • mark_and_sweep 5mo ago
      Technically, yes. Markdown was always intended to be used for creating HTML and thus allows you to use HTML inline (with some minor caveats, see: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html). If you rename a .html file to .md, your markdown viewer should render it just the same as your browser did.
• tmhrtly 5mo ago
  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.
  • bigfudge 5mo ago
    [dead]
  • 4k0hz 5mo ago
    Is HTML really that much worse to edit than MD?
    • psychoslave 5mo ago
      Let’s see… *No!* I mean, <b>yes!</b> It depends what we mean I guess, isn’t Markdown supposed to allow [hx]ml tags anyway if user need them? Then it’s more about asking the LLM to generate Markdown with this in consideration, and privilege rendering the output of reports in the preferred browser after relevant rendering.
      • abirch 5mo ago
        1. I believe many applications that use markdown allow html. Others don't due to security/rendering issues. 2. One of the limiting factors of LLM is context. An html table takes up way more tokens than a markdown table. Especially if it's a WYSIWYG editor that has all kinds of css and <span> tags just for fun.
        • 5mo ago
• Zhengyang_Hou 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• htch 5mo ago
  We’ve been doing this for a couple of months at work for internal memos and decision records, it’s really powerful. I love being able to drop in interactive visuals and more dynamic content. We have a Cloudflare R2-backed Document Store for managing them, and CLI for publishing, and I’m working on an MCP server for long-term discovery and context. My team kept asking if they could leave comments though, so I built Annotent [1] to help with that, which is also MCP-backed. 1. https://www.annotent.com/ https://www.annotent.com/
• ryandsilva 5mo ago
  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.
  • IanCal 5mo ago
    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.
  • mock-possum 5mo ago
    Also there’s a wider code execution vulnerability for HTML. Plaintext would never hurt you.
  • gogoro 5mo ago
    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.
• ocimbote 5mo ago
  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.
  • ozim 5mo ago
    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”.
  • k4rli 5mo ago
    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.
• estetlinus 5mo ago
  I’ve also realized CC is exceptional on html, creating local apps for reviewing output, dashboards sourced from DuckDB, etc. To review PRs in a little custom app is a very good idea. Who cares about 1.2x more tokens when clarity is squared? Nice article!
• imbnwa 5mo ago
  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/ https://slim-template.github.io/
• doc_ick 5mo ago
  ~html has more capabilities than markdown~ the real title Weren’t llms specifically originally set to output and print markdown format since it is simpler and easier everyone to read? No different rendering/libraries/apis to worry about…
• zhangyan985 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• readitalready 5mo ago
  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 example, to confirm database fields match across various spec documents, etc.. The static analysis is also why you use JSON/XML instead of HTML, since you can now have your own custom schema. Also don't use YAML, as that's far more unreliable. (If you chop a YAML file in half, it's still valid)
  • danw1979 5mo ago
    you can embed JSON objects in a <script> tag if you need to.
  • yokoprime 5mo ago
    I think this is super interesting, but i think you and the OP is talking about two different problems: presenting text to end users and structuring text for agents
    • readitalready 5mo ago
      This flow is really for LLM consumption, since Markdown spec documents are for LLMs anyways. And you can always write a JSON-to-markdown converter for human use (actually, LLMs remember Markdown content better than JSON, so you should use that in your flow a well). The real change is in generation side, and now the spec docs are LLM generated JSON based on other spec docs or human prompts. LLMs seem to write JSON better than Markdown or YAML, if you tell it to follow a schema.
      • ehsanu1 5mo ago
        For my schemas, I found LLMs really wanted to just use markdown embedded in the strings, so I've been considering doing away with the schema. I also figure that embedding markdown in a string may make it perform worse as it has to juggle nested formats, and thus escaping and such (wanted: eval for this). By replacing the json tool call with basic markdown extraction, I'd lose some structured data but gain flexibility (html would be even more flexible). Wondering if you are referring to adherence to required data in a schema when you say LLMs do better with json vs markdown, or something else? Or perhaps to tool calls and/or strict json output being more reliably formatted for clean extraction?
• steve_adams_86 5mo ago
  I was running into issues with markdown and mermaid the other day and decided to tell Claude to use HTML, then realized that opened up the option of JS as well. Given we were trying to model state management in an existing typescript application, we could use ts-morph to correctly map out the call sites within different components, even use math to determine various factors of refactoring or relocating and so on. It ended up being a large document but it was infinitely more useful than plain old markdown. I think I’ll do it more often now. Creating interactive specs is a really fascinating way to work. I’ve always verified my work in similar ways, but this was more… Verification-forward, I guess. And it took hours instead of days. It’s actually really fun to be building and refactoring these days. No idea how long the fun will last, but I’m thoroughly enjoying it right now. I know it will make some people think I’m a hack, but I know that approach enabled me to do a faster, more targeted, ultimately better job of improving state management in the application. It’s not because Claude wrote the code (I still did quite a bit of it), but because Claude helped me establish the right work to do for the right reasons, using tools I couldn’t dream of throwing together 5 years ago.
• forgotusername6 5mo ago
  I've been struggling with markdown recently as I really want the claims it makes in documents to be programmatically verifiable e.g. citations, I want a simple script to check that each of the files and lines of code it references actually exist. Perhaps HTML can be used for this. It certainly has a better chance than markdown.
• Diti 5mo ago
  Claude understands AsciiDoc just fine. His training data makes it so that most AsciiDoc documents he generates uses Markdown-like capabilities, but a gentle push in an appended system prompt (like a “feel free to use all of AsciiDoc’s features”) makes him create very nice documents to iterate on, in my opinion.
• LunicLynx 5mo ago
  Markdown is not necessarily about presentation. It’s about structure that carries information. Surely a html page could do the same but I would see that as the last step, to give to someone else.
• Igor_Wiwi 5mo ago
  [dead]
• jwr 5mo ago
  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.
  • phren0logy 5mo ago
    Are you using that cmarker commonmark Typst package? Is it good? https://typst.app/universe/package/cmarker/ https://typst.app/universe/package/cmarker/
    • jwr 5mo ago
      No, I built my own pipeline using pandoc+Typst. Works great.
• denalii 5mo ago
  > I find it difficult to read a markdown file of more than a hundred lines. Apologies if I'm slightly demeaning here, but what? Markdown is largely plaintext. Unless the output is completely littered with markdown formatting (specifically, imo, tables and maybe links would be the hardest for a human to parse), is this not just saying "I have a difficult time reading large bodies of text" (which is of course fine - people prefer different ways ingesting information) From reading the post, this seems like a "I personally prefer more visual, interactive elements in output" rather than "agents using markdown leads for less understandable output", and not at all what I would recommend for the average person to use unless said agent or interface or whatever had an extremely seamless way of displaying the HTML. If I had to open the agents response in a browser every time I wanted anything detailed I would lose my mind. I've certainly had agents generate more rich visualizations such as through html, but I can't imagine using that as my default.
• GreenJacketBoy 5mo ago
  The problem I have with this shift is that you basically give up on writing documentation by hand, not only for you, but for everybody who might want to edit your documentation. I'm also not convinced that it solves meaningful problems : > I've found I tend to not actually read more than a 100-line markdown file, and I certainly am not able to get anyone else in my organization to read it. But HTML documents are much easier to read, In my experience, LLMs are not concise when it comes to documentation, so using an easier file format to read because the text is too large sounds to me like solving the wrong problem > Markdown files are fairly hard to share since most browsers do not render them natively well. Yes, but developers tools (IDE, Git forge) do. What most/some of them don't render natively IS HTML.
  • pbhjpbhj 5mo ago
    >But HTML documents are much easier to read, [than markdown] Presumably you mean rendered HTML rather than the source documents?
  • IanCal 5mo ago
    Writing and editing html by hand is very simple, it can be just a few basic tags.
  • sverhagen 5mo ago
    >I tend to not actually read more than a 100-line markdown file I tend to not actually read more than 100-lines of anything anymore. I've long referred to myself as "the Google generation": only being able to read the summaries in a search result. That, and the typical doomscrolling model of social media have affected my attention span. Reading anything more substantial takes real effort now.
• FailMore 5mo ago
  Firstly I think this is a super interesting approach to a real problem. I think it offers a lot. I wonder about frustrations around consistency etc though. Have you had any? I have been building a slightly different solution to the same problem. So far I’m pretty happy with the results and I have enough returning users that I think others are too (https://sdocs.dev/analytics https://sdocs.dev/analytics). I’ve built SmallDocs (https://sdocs.dev https://sdocs.dev; Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633). SDocs is cli (`sdoc file.md`) -> instantly rendered Markdown file in the browser When you install the cli it gives you the option to add a note in your base agent file (`~/.claude/CLAUDE.md`, etc.). This means every agent chat knows about SDocs and you can say “sdoc me the plan when you’re done with it” and the file will pop open instead of you having to find that terminal session to know it’s done. Going browser first means you’re not required to install anything to get a great experience. Despite being in the browser, the content of SDocs rendered Markdown files remain entirely local to you. SDoc urls contain your markdown document's content in compressed base64 in the url fragment (the bit after the `#`): https://sdocs.dev/#md=GzcFAMT...(this https://sdocs.dev/#md=GzcFAMT...(this is the contents of your document)... The url fragment is never sent to the server (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F...: "The fragment is not sent to the server when the URI is requested; it is processed by the client"). The sdocs.dev webapp is purely a client side decoding and rendering engine for the content stored in the url fragment. This also means you can share your .md files privately by sharing the url. To go a bit deeper towards the HTML side of things I’ve added tagged code blocks that the agent is given documentation on how to use. Eg ```chart or ```mermaid (for mermaid diagrams). These then become interactive elements on the page (mermaid is best example of this currently)
  • d0gsg0w00f 5mo ago
    I really like this idea. The md preview thing is super annoying. However, I was hoping your solution was like a local desktop app thats a dedicated md rendering app, things you've asked for line up in the queue for review. My browser is like a junk drawer, can't be bothered to go hunting in there.
    • 5mo ago
• stuaxo 5mo ago
  This is HTML very much as an output format though. What happens when my site changes style, I put it back through the LLM I guess and get some bonus hallucinated content.
• Planktonne 5mo ago
  > I find it difficult to read a markdown file of more than a hundred lines. This is the sort of observation that should make you concerned about your own skills, rather than spur you to generate an article (longer than you can read easily) trying to give advice to other people. The linked article could have been made using Markdown, and yet the author still chose to represent themselves this way; there's no point changing the tool when the problem is the user.
• PhilippGille 5mo ago
  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 https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html [2] https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#html-blocks https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#html-blocks
  • the_gipsy 5mo ago
    You should never have to preview a markdown document, in my opinion. At that point, just make an HTML document.
• isoprophlex 5mo ago
  Each one trades a document you'd skim for one you'd actually read — emdash — or does it really? That entirely depends on your preference of course. Classical overly confident llm bullshitting.
• suyavuz 5mo ago
  [dead]
• stephbook 5mo ago
  Whenever I read these pro-AI software engineering articles, I skim them first, looking for AI tells. Sure enough, this is full of listicles and of a length no human would write for an idea as simple as "Use HTML instead of Markdown."
• Amber-chen 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• arianvanp 5mo ago
  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
  • danieldisu 5mo ago
    Don't get me started on the "templating" for Twitter Articles, it doesn't even support markdown...
  • bonsai_spool 5mo ago
    https://thariqs.github.io/html-effectiveness/ https://thariqs.github.io/html-effectiveness/ I guess it’s both
• utopiah 5mo ago
  The unreasonable effectiveness of the most popular "programming" language used by the most people on Earth ever that has been careful crafted by extremely dedicated people for decades and that is use to communicate by, to and from the most people that ever existed (because yes, most "apps", on mobile at least but even more and more on desktop are just HTML pages too). Is it really unreasonably effective?
  • 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
    I always worry about posting comments like this. A lot of tech bros are like "form logical arguments about why this clickbait isn't clickbait otherwise you are a troll". You beat me too it. Thanks for your service. I also love how maybe 10% of the posts on here are like "some thing that has existed for 40+ years ,/:/; Claude/chatgpt". So much advertising at the expense of a dead internet it's ridiculous.
  • SlinkyOnStairs 5mo ago
    The phrase "unreasonable effectiveness" is used here in the context of AI. Where "we put a whole bunch of markup characters in the context" not messing up the output significantly could be considered unexpected. The actual performance impact is unknowable, given the difficulty of measuring LLM performance. And whomever pays for your tokens won't be pleased either. While it has been used in the context of HTML before, it's a bit of a "meme" as several papers used that phrase. Much like the "X is all you need" snowclone. The HTML version dates from 2021 (https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiven...) when client side rendering and web apps were still their peak.
• DeadEye2111 5mo ago
  We've circled back to TimBL's original vision of hypertext documents with links. It's beautiful.
• seebeen 5mo ago
  Why does everyone feel the need to reinvent the wheel every few days?
• eddyaipt 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• vdelpuerto 5mo ago
  Mmm....His position of "stopped using markdown altogether for almost everything" strikes me as overstated and selfpromotional. The 2-4x higher generation cost is non-trivial when you're operating under rate limits, and Git versioning friction is a real problem for your work in big and complex repos. I use the rule "HTML for deliverables, Markdown for infrastructure" and it seems more defensible than HTML maximalism.
• johndreic 5mo ago
  HTML+Tailwind is the only format where "looks roughly correct" and "is structurally correct" have the same probability. Every other output format needs a renderer to find out which one you got.
  • F7F7F7 5mo ago
    HTML and hand written CSS mind as well be legally binding.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• thih9 5mo ago
  To each their own but my immediate reaction is that I find text and markdown clearer. In html I don’t like the extra ornaments (borders, bullets, badges, etc). To be fair, I usually ask for concise and specific information, where this kind of response style would be a distraction.
• 40four 5mo ago
  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.
  • graemep 5mo ago
    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.
    • 40four 5mo ago
      #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).
• mmckelvy 5mo ago
  Another great use case is piping database output (e.g. psql) directly to HTML. HTML tables can be opened in a browser or directly in Excel. So all you need for a complete BI tool is a database and the command line.
• Polarity 5mo ago
  I always liked the Idea of HTML as a document format. And i never understood why people prefered .docx or .txt. And where are the whysiwyg editors like dreamweaver? Really loved this stuff back in the day.
• bdelmas 5mo ago
  Interesting read. I totally agree but like he said it takes 2 to 4 times the time to generate one. With today’s prices for tokens it’s not affordable. But once models are getting cheaper and cheaper I am sure the industry will move to this.
• mritchie712 5mo ago
  We previously had our (https://www.definite.app/ https://www.definite.app/) agent write reports / dashboards in a YAML spec that would get rendered by our frontend framework (i.e. charts and tables). For example, user says "build a report with revenue and orders by month and show 100 most recent orders". The agent would write a spec that would get rendered by our frontend. This runs fast, but we were drowning in feature requests for what the framework could render (e.g. "I don't want labels here", "I DO want labels there", "can this chart be a heatmap", etc.) A few months ago, we let the agent just write HTML instead. It takes longer to generate, but you get unlimited customization. There are a host of issues with the new approach (non-technical users debugging a monstrous app they created), but net-net our customers like it much better.
  • le-mark 5mo ago
    How do you protect against prompt injection in this case?
• neomantra 5mo ago
  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.
• nedt 5mo ago
  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.
  • salomonk_mur 5mo ago
    I think MDX is the perfect middle ground. I'm gonna start using it instead of plain Markdown thanks to this comment. Thanks!!
• deleted 5mo ago
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• TheJCDenton 5mo ago
  Quarkdown is a partial and interesting alternative : https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown
  • chrsw 5mo ago
    This one is interesting and has potential, for me. I never liked HTML/XML/etc and Markdown might be a little _too_ minimal.
• igtztorrero 5mo ago
  I use obsidian MD editor to save important chats I made on Claude or Gemini. It's the best markdown editor. So when I need to check any past reference I just open my folder or files. Html it's so ugly. I wish IA products add a save al chat button, to avoid copy and paste every response.
• lokimedes 5mo ago
  I built a Markdown viewer https://markant.md https://markant.md to go with the flow rather than against it. I also cooked up a mew format, which basically bundles markdown and images into “Markbooks” https://markbooks.org https://markbooks.org. LLMs don’t even need an Agent Skill to understand the format, as it is just a zip with and index.md plus assets. I’d love for people here to consider the idea.
• bicepjai 5mo ago
  I notice this trend where presentations are being made with html. Even I have some prompts that create quick html + JavaScript for data viz. may be it will become our new ppts
• fredwilliams 5mo ago
  Aren’t HTML blocks valid Markdown? Why not just put the stuff you need in HTML and keep the rest simple?
• znort_ 5mo ago
  looks like a disproportionally huge wall of text (on twitter no less) for a non-issue. just choose your tools sensibly: - work text / human or mixed input: markdown, plain text - fancy looks / interaction: html avoid creating problems, try solving them instead. and don't start futile smoke campaigns.
• MavropaliasG 5mo ago
  The author is completely missing the point of markdown. "HTML can convey much richer information compared to markdown. It can of course do simple document structure like headers and formatting, but it can also represent all sorts of other information" Yes exactly, and markdown is used when someone wants to just have raw text.
• twobitshifter 5mo ago
  Mario zechner did a talk on this where he states that he just gets everything from an agent as an html slide show. It looks better and you can page through it and there can be diagrams etc… Unfortunately I couldn’t find a link to the talk.
• mock-possum 5mo ago
  Let’s be fair, about half of these things are provided by markdown as well: > Tabular data using tables yes > Illustrations with SVG yes > Code snippets with script tags yes > Workflows using SVG and HTML svgs yes > Images using image tags yes > Design data with CSS no > Interactions using HTML elements with javascript + CSS no > Spatial data using absolute positions and canvases no, although svgs help That said, I can kinda get behind this ‘html, not markdown’ idea - as much as I like keeping things lean and mean, and markdown is ‘just enough’ semantics and style on top of plaintext… it can admittedly be more useful to recieve a more flavorful writeup from an LLM, if it’s going to be a piece that really requires you to engage with it, rather than just a quick read. Certainly a better fit for reports.
• 8bitbeep 5mo ago
  There’s nothing unreasonable about HTML being effective at what it was designed for.
• jdjdjdjdjd 5mo ago
  "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.
  • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5mo ago
    Heck, these days the email is the HTML
    • jimmydoe 5mo ago
      they dont exec js
  • kwerk 5mo ago
    Or just ask Claude to find a connector to share html
• nojvek 5mo ago
  One layer above html is having Claude produce .jsx or .tsx files. Because it can have little components with jsx (html like) bits, it’s fairly human readable and editable. Components give it semantic compression and the high level scan makes it easier to understand and change.
• the__alchemist 5mo ago
  ELI5: What is the context? Is this something to the effect of "Claude; please solve <> problem with with function <> in module <>. Instead of plain text, return your results as formatted HTML instead of plain text"?
• deleted 5mo ago
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• jcutrell 5mo ago
  This really is the perfect time for something like MDX to shine.
• arjie 5mo ago
  One thing I found quite good in earlier LLMs once they introduced the “Canvas” tool is to let them iterate on a thing (which they would do with React and friends) and then finally asking them to convert to a single file HTML+JS which they’d do admirably. These days, modern LLMs just get it right first time. I like these little tools for myself. E.g. some are like this one here: https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/voxtral-viewer/?t=jeffrey-epstein-last-interview-with-steve-bannon-transcription-20260206T035211&speaker_1=Steve%20Bannon&speaker_2=Unknown&speaker_3=Jeffrey%20Epstein https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/voxtral-viewer/?t=jeffrey-epste... Which I use for things like reading podcasts (I’m not much of a listener - prefer to read) all single page HTML. I also make little sims for myself like: https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/baby-opportunity-cost/ https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/baby-opportunity-cost/ The single page format has some conveniences like you can iframe it in when you want like I do on this blog post to illustrate an idea: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-14/Fertility_Rate https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-14/Fertility_Ra... LLMs are good at tag demarcation. I wonder if that’s why we use tags for in-band signaling (<reasoning>) etc. or whether they’re good for it because they trained them to be good for in-band signaling. Would be cool to hear from someone at a lab about this.
• richard___ 5mo ago
  The solution is latex
  • _giorgio_ 5mo ago
    Thanks for this. It's a very beautiful language, it's quite simple, if you like simple.
• kwerk 5mo ago
  Discovered this quite by accident. My cofounder and I were building a pdf editor and I’d analyzed 1,400 PDFs to see where our editor broke. I asked Claude to make an explainer of the process and it popped out an html with a working interactive pdf renderer.
• throwaw12 5mo ago
  Is this another way of saying: HTML will increase revenue by increasing token usage, so let's advocate for it
• nave94hn 5mo ago
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• malshe 5mo ago
  I posted this same Twitter article about 5-6 hours before this post was made and got only a couple of likes and zero comments. What gives? Using Claude Code: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48069859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48069859
  • poolnoodle 5mo ago
    Bad luck but doesn't really matter, does it?
    • malshe 5mo ago
      I'm just curious. Also not sure what's the rule regarding submitting dupes.
• redsocksfan45 5mo ago
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• OfekSh 5mo ago
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• daft_pink 5mo ago
  I think the problem is that plain text is very easy to read and markdown is essentially plain text.
• insane_dreamer 5mo ago
  > Joyful If that's the goal, use haml and sass You get human readability + the power of html
• poolnoodle 5mo ago
  I'm starting to think HN isn't what it used to be when rubbish like this hits the front page.
• jacktu 5mo ago
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• tomasz-tomczyk 5mo ago
  When building new features, I use a skill that generates 5+ variants based on various companies' design language and patterns, in plain html/css/js - quick throwaway prototypes, gives me an idea of different ways the thing could look or behave. It's very very useful and I usually end up combining a couple of the best aspects. For side projects with no designer, it's been great. I don't have any issue with markdown though - but terminal isn't a place to review it and leave useful feedback. Use one of the many tools that are popping up or build your own (like I did) to leave comments and iterate.
• mxkuzn 5mo ago
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• kebman 5mo ago
  HTML is a structured document format designed for publishing content online. It gives precise control over elements such as headings, links, images, sections, forms, styling hooks, and layout behaviour in the browser. But the cost is complexity. Markdown is a lightweight document format that leans toward easy writing, reading, and sharing. It is much simpler than HTML, easier to edit by hand, and works well for notes, documentation, drafts, README files, and content that may later be converted into HTML, PDF, or other formats. That's why I'll continue to use Markdown for most of my notes and documentation, while I'll only use HTML for "public facing" documents.
• georgeburdell 5mo ago
  I use Markdown + plugins and one of the Git providers to maintain software contracts with other teams that I can’t trust to do the right thing. It has the benefits of having readable diffs and being maintainable by a human, if needed. HTML as the author acknowledges does not make readable diffs. Markdown remains great because the other side is just going to use Claude to do their work anyway, and I can use Claude to verify their work meets my specifications.
• Bmello11 5mo ago
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• fuglede_ 5mo ago
  I've reached for this solution many times too; it's certainly convenient. What I don't like is that all the resulting pages look the same. It's so easy to tell when a page is authored by Claude, and by now, I get the same “ugh another one” feeling as Dall-E generated images would give when they were completely overdone. Maybe it's just be, but if not, maybe HTML generated outputs will also end up being dialed down from where they're at now. But maybe not, since it's obviously a useful thing to be able to do. I wonder if there's a way out. To be able to introduce some natural entropy so not everything ends up looking the same. I guess not, since we're using machines whose natural mode of behavior is regression toward the mean. And maybe having it be harder to tell the author wouldn't even be desirable anyway.
• brentcrude 5mo ago
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• WhoffAgents 5mo ago
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• TedDallas 5mo ago
  I had created my own chat tool that can render html responses directly in the chat interface, if needed. It is very handy for when I am needing rich(er) responses dealing for mathematical expressions. But it burns more tokens. It is useful, but I don’t need it for coding.
• ziofill 5mo ago
  I use Claude code daily to run and manage various experiments, and then I ask for html reports. Simply put, it’s a joy to use.
• davegri 5mo ago
  I've been doing something similar with scientific papers, you give it the paper and ask it to reproduce it as a nice html blog post and it often recreates all the diagrams and formats everything really nicely
• BoredPositron 5mo ago
  I don't see a case for effectiveness on both examples?
• locusofself 5mo ago
  I've created a number of apps for myself using just html or, simple node+sqlite running locally. Great for learning apps, personalized todo/priority tracking, etc.
• emodendroket 5mo ago
  I realize Claude Code is pretty impressive in a lot of ways -- certainly the way I'm working looks really different than it did last year -- but I think it is kind of funny that we are rediscovering basic ideas like "HTML is capable of richer display than Markdown."
• SylonZero 5mo ago
  This viewpoint talks about consuming markdown natively without reference to how non-technical users view it: as rendered HTML. At best, this makes a case for introducing a few more useful constructs into markdown (without ruining it's simplicity of course).
• themafia 5mo ago
  > I'm not sure what direction to take the onboarding screen. I don't know, maybe, you could just pay people to use it, and see where the problems are, and then be informed by that? We're using LLMs as if human contact and experience is hard to come by at a point in history when it's anything but. These goofy models are a complete and total dead end. They're actively in the way of better approaches.
• CrzyLngPwd 5mo ago
  hey Siri, make some web pages that extol the virtues of getting my favourite AI to use HTML instead of MD.
• giancarlostoro 5mo ago
  This reminds me of some article on HN a while back that XML makes Claude more effective... I guess it makes even more sense to ask for HTML back, since it is XML.
• Amber-chen 5mo ago
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• russellbeattie 5mo ago
  We need a Rich Text Standard akin to Unicode. It's truly absurd that we can universally read and write emojis with variable skin color across all platforms, but I can't send bold or italic text. If can use emojis in my terminal text editor - even in a Markdown document itself - why the hell can't I bold or italicize?? We desperately need to fix this insanity. Markdown by itself is: Headings, bold, italic, lists, blockquote, code, horizontal rule, link and image. That's it. Everything else is some sort of custom addition like tables. Surely in 2026 we can figure out how to make this a universal standard. I truly despise Markdown. I'd say about 25% of my posts on HN is me ranting about how much I hate it. This has mostly just lowered my karma, but that's OK. I'm not wrong, it sucks.
• maCDzP 5mo ago
  I have tried that and it works well for me. I can also recommend using a Visual Studio plugin called Markco that lets you comment a markdown file. It’s resembles words commenting feature. I use it to comment LLM generated markdown.
• syngrog66 5mo ago
  Or we could just use our brains, eyes, fingers, and programming languages. Which all clearly work just fine, despite what the AI promoting hypesters would have you believe. Plain text is fine. Markdown is fine. All of it is OK. Don't give in to FOMU and peer pressure, kids. Conformity is not required.
• zianKazi 5mo ago
  Seems to me that html is a nice output format for a lot of use cases. However, since AI is getting pricier, markdown is a more sensible default. I prefer something that's natively human readable text.
• baigy 5mo ago
  Increases the blast radius needlessly, and can ultimately introduce bugs in our docs too. Yikes! But yea I get it, it's prettier. What they're actually advocating for is a version of markdown with prettification.
• socketcluster 5mo ago
  This is why I built https://saasufy.com/ https://saasufy.com/ - There are 23 generic HTML components which can be assembled to provide a flexible way to render any kind of data and flexible form elements to flexibly update the data (or show errors when validation fails). It's fully declarative so there is very little room for errors. I find that this helps a lot when working with LLMs. There are no complex bugs. The only kinds of bugs you might encounter are syntax or UX related. No weird race conditions or complex technical issues.
• nxobject 5mo ago
  In an alternate universe where HTML was the native input-output format of LLMs, we'd be talking about the unreasonable effectiveness of Markdown in sparing tokens for reasoning.
• _heimdall 5mo ago
  If I were to reach for HTML to consume LLM markdown files, and that is an interesting idea, I'd want to use a build system and define my own design system for my specs. I'd still want the LLM using markdown, its a much better fit than HTML for loading context. I'd want to consume it in a nicer visual representation. It writes something like `<ds-table>` and it builds to a styled HTML table for me.
• thesuperevil 5mo ago
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• tqwhite 5mo ago
  YES YES YES and MORE YES Generating markdown is faster so unlike our friend here, I still do use it for straightforward things. BUT, in general, I tell Claude, "I think we should starting a project planning folder for this. Put (the stuff we just talked about) into an html doc. while you're at it, make an index.html and put relative link to the page with a little explanation of what we are up to." Or, just yesterday Claude and I worked out the design for a substantial AI enabled database tool. I had it make an explanatory doc for my team. It was a single html file that navigated through forty scenes that demonstrated it. MAGIC. If you aren't doing your collaboration with Claude in html, listen to this guy. Your life and work will be better.
• tqwhite 5mo ago
  This makes me think of a thing I have been planning to do. Maybe one of you will do it and tell me some cool refinements. I run a web server on my Mac. Consequently, I have an HTTP process available. I keep intending to make an endpoint that Claude can use. I would tell it to make a document for commenting (or put a list of options or whatever) and post it to, I guess, the planning folder we are working in. The endpoint would know how to do this because I wrote it. When it gets there, I would, I wanted to keep it, tell Claude to integrate the results into the file as static HTML. Or, if I don't care about that, just read it and do whatever I said and leave it disconnected.. The goal isn't to make a website. This supports interactive conversations with Claude via HTML.
  • tqwhite 5mo ago
    By "planning", I actually meant "thought of one time". So, I did it. The endpoint verifies that the destination specified by the POST is in my project folder. If it points at an existing file, it creates a version. It does not overwrite. I added a CLI, watchFile, that blocks Claude until the file shows up. And made a skill that tells Claude to respond nicely to "Make an interactive document that...". Claude Code has basically made software functionality, "Your wishes come true".
  • tqwhite 5mo ago
    Another upgrade. Now the skill knows to create a containing folder with index.html if none exists and then to link any new docs to it. Now I have a favorite in my bookmark bar for each project I am working on that shows me the docs. I'm so happy.
• ramoz 5mo ago
  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 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 https://x.com/plannotator/status/2052851731998941380?s=46
• yencabulator 5mo ago
  The examples that are asking for UX sketches, design and animations utterly irrelevant -- of course HTML is going to win over plaintext when the requested artifact is a page in a webapp.
• eddyaipt 5mo ago
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• eddyaipt 5mo ago
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• nave94hn 5mo ago
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