Ask HN: If HTML supersedes Markdown fr AI, Will it be versatile enough for devs? Isn't Markdown's hallmark its versatility while performant?
I see there is an increasing call from tech community towards HTML to be adopted instead of Markdown due to its richness in the agentic communication layer. But is it versatile across any kind of interfaces? versatile with different format conversions? and performant (as the md is lightweight)? |
depending on your tooling, editing and viewing html won't be a problem in the slightest and opens up all kinds of possibilities
personally very excited to introduce more html into my docs process
HTML is a communication layer. Hardly anyone is writing it directly. Using React etc. or whatever or even LLM.
My point is: what’s the total number of html files in existence? Billions. What’s the total number of markdown readme files.
B) HTML can contain data, layout, and design within a single file. Markdown isn’t comparable. There will be many situations where Markdown can’t do what HTML, so this is overall a silly comparison.
If there is a communication between two points with ultimate low latency way with readability and threshold just enough to have the idea, MD passes that mark. As tokens needs to conserved
Also, latency???
MD is usually converted to HTML and then rendered by a webview, which means MD is more expensive.
> compounding costs for a communication doc may be billions in a year
Lol absolutely not. It would be surprising if the "compounding costs for a communication doc" reached $1 a year. I don't think you understand how efficient computers are and how optimized HTML rendering has become.
> As tokens needs to conserved
Not really. No large org is really optimizing for fewer tokens yet.