Yeah, Reading it clearly in the editor - Probably MD to HTML happens in the editor anyway. So what we are dealing with here are a battle between ease of writing, readability and various cost dimensions.
A) Enterprises for one, e.g Rendering of an HTML page vs MD in an AI IDE or even tokens (compounding costs for a communication doc may be billions in a year)
B) True, its a subset, nobody is arguing against it. HTML has overheads in terms of stylings. MD in essence is just a straight arrow.
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
What do you mean by the cost of rendering an HTML page in an IDE? You know those markdown previews are almost always rendered by converting them to an HTML snippet first, right? Also HTML does not need to be styled, the tags have their own semantic meanings just like the various semantic structures of markdown. The styling “overhead”, which gets added so the document is easier to visually interpret for a human, is exactly the same. The only time when styling doesn’t come into the equation is when you directly view markdown source.
If cost of showing HTML and MD are same in the CPU level for UI, but generation of them costs uneven at AI level (as it should be mathematically), shouldn't the equation be what is the lowest cost to represent something considering the token usage
> Rendering of an HTML page vs MD in an AI IDE or even tokens
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.
Thats a complete reductive idea of MDs. MD was long spawn before LLMs as a need for light weight formatting and easy conversion to different formats. No one used at that scale doesnt mean the absence of the utility for it, as the primary adopters were tech community and that was a layer below the consumer market. Utility obviously stands, the question is, can HTML supersede on that utility side of it in all developer work components.
