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> 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.

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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.

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That's highly dependent on what sites you're visiting. Take a look around at a lot of modern sites, there's a sea of divs and spans. Markdown conversion helps LLMs a lot.
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Aah, I thought we are talking about prompting or providing information to AI agents in either html or md form, and comparing the two.

Assuming that is what we are talking about, HTML is easier to work with than Markdown, unless you are writing it by hand. That is, composing semantic HTML is more ergonomic than composing a Markdown formatted document from components / snippets, programmatically. The libraries are just better and more versatile in most programming languages. Typically you go from HTML or Markdown to AST, then you compose them to end up with the final tree, then you format the tree to HTML or Markdown. LLMs treat them basically identically (context in HTML or context in Markdown), so I have ended up forming complex prompts / context parts using HTML.

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