Is Markdown dead? Long live HTML?
Why Markdown rules AI era but HTML may win for human reading. A balanced take on the future of AI formats.
Humans spent half a century moving documents from typewriters to Word, and another twenty years moving them to the cloud. Yet in the AI era, the true universal format has turned out to be a plain-text language invented in 2004—Markdown.
Recently, Claude Code engineer Thariq sparked a heated discussion by proposing a new view: he no longer uses Markdown—HTML is the future.
In his article, he argues that outputting in HTML format is a superior medium compared to Markdown text. For AI, switching from outputting Markdown to outputting HTML is almost painless, but for users, it delivers a tangible improvement in experience.
Early this morning, Karpathy also reposted the article and shared his thoughts on HTML.
In his view, audio is the best input for large language models, while vision is the best output. Beyond HTML, there will be interactive animations, videos directly generated by neural networks, and ultimately some form of true perceptual fusion between humans and machines.
In the era where Vibe Coding and Agent products are becoming mainstream, most AI users are already familiar with both HTML and Markdown.
Want to make a small game? Just tell ChatGPT: “Help me create a single-page HTML Snake game.” ChatGPT will package the code into a file with the .html extension. Double-click it, and you can play an interactive, animated, rich graphical game directly in your browser.
Even simpler: on any webpage in the browser, press CTRL + S to save it, and you’ll get a local .html file.
Meanwhile, ever since the era when AI needed to understand web context, Markdown has had a wealth of tools that can convert almost any file type into Markdown format.
Microsoft, the king of the office suite with its docx, pptx, and xlsx formats, open-sourced a project years ago that converts these common office documents to Markdown. It has now garnered over 120,000 stars on GitHub.
