3 ms·

> On the other hand, I can view HTML without any extra/unusual tools. And composing HTML when I need a bit of structure is far easier than composing markdown.

by slowin 2mo ago

> On the other hand, I can view HTML without any extra/unusual tools. And composing HTML when I need a bit of structure is far easier than composing markdown. This is kind of the opposite of reality no? Markdown is just plain text and meant to be human readable. You don't need XML tags to read and write it, opposed to html where you do and you need a browser to properly view it.

honr 1mo ago
No, it's just that I wasn't very clear. HTML I can view in any browser / webview / etc. Good markdown viewers are fewer / more special, or end up translating md to html for display. And by composing, I didn't mean writing by hand. We are talking about prompting, right? Or that is what I thought we are talking about. Composing HTML "components" into a final prompt HTML is easier than composing markdown snippets into the final prompt. That is because with HTML there are several ergonomic libraries to parse HTML to AST and to format AST back to HTML. The libraries (for parsing to AST and back to strings) are more limited with markdown.
- sebastiennight 1mo ago
  A "prompt" is what goes into the LLM, so I'm not sure what you mean by "a final prompt HTML".
  - honr 1mo ago
    I often compose prompts from various sources (my "AGENTS.md", "CURRENT_TASK", "CURRENT_PHASE", ...). Last year I was composing in markdown and that got very tedious very quickly. I tried various text and text-like formats, and it turned out HTML is already one of the best formats for this, including for an "AGENTS.md" (which I keep in HTML despite the required ".md" extension). Of course, if you build up your prompt entirely by hand (copy pasting snippets, etc.) you can get away with markdown or plain text. That works okay for some harnesses, but it leaves too much control (or more accurately, opportunity to misunderstand) to the harness.

by slowin 2mo ago

honr 1mo ago

No, it's just that I wasn't very clear. HTML I can view in any browser / webview / etc. Good markdown viewers are fewer / more special, or end up translating md to html for display. And by composing, I didn't mean writing by hand. We are talking about prompting, right? Or that is what I thought we are talking about. Composing HTML "components" into a final prompt HTML is easier than composing markdown snippets into the final prompt. That is because with HTML there are several ergonomic libraries to parse HTML to AST and to format AST back to HTML. The libraries (for parsing to AST and back to strings) are more limited with markdown.

sebastiennight 1mo ago
A "prompt" is what goes into the LLM, so I'm not sure what you mean by "a final prompt HTML".
- honr 1mo ago
  I often compose prompts from various sources (my "AGENTS.md", "CURRENT_TASK", "CURRENT_PHASE", ...). Last year I was composing in markdown and that got very tedious very quickly. I tried various text and text-like formats, and it turned out HTML is already one of the best formats for this, including for an "AGENTS.md" (which I keep in HTML despite the required ".md" extension). Of course, if you build up your prompt entirely by hand (copy pasting snippets, etc.) you can get away with markdown or plain text. That works okay for some harnesses, but it leaves too much control (or more accurately, opportunity to misunderstand) to the harness.