[al_borland]

For me, a key tenant of any good note taking system is low friction. Leaning on an LLM feels like significant friction. Formatting something into HTML manually also feels like a lot of fiction. Individual HTML files for notes would also be a friction filled experience for opening and browsing, without some kind of template to allow for navigation of the notes within the browser. This ends up turning into a local wiki very quickly.

[ramoz]

I was about to comment: "HTML creates too much friction after doing all sorts of visual explainers" ... thanks for articulating it well.

As a layer of abstraction, it also creates more requirements: need a browser, likely need includes/cdn libs to avoid bloat, all sorts of other things. Markdown is consumable, diffable, shareable in raw form - and you can add enrichment layers on top without much effort.

[thr1owaway9621]

To me, the "enrichment" layer means 2 things:

- a tiny DSL for rendering anything custom, where every markdown renderer potentially introduces its own unique bit of syntax that's not transferable (example: frontmatter in Obsidian where you can put tags, that's not vanilla markdown)

- a note taking / viewing app, of which we now have dozens, where moving notes from one app to another creates friction, because of the custom "enrichment" layer each of those apps have (example: any popular plugin in Obsidian, where your notes are now littered with that plugin's tags)

HTML has this type of "enrichment" built-in.

Anyway, I am not trying to convince anyone. This is me working through this in my head. I have a large vault of Obsidian notes that I want to make more useful. And I figure, HTML is the standard-issue tool for producing beautiful-looking and functional text documents, so it's worth thinking about.