We Measured the LLM Token Cost of 4 Markup Formats: TSX Costs 94% More Than Pug
Part 3 of “The Tokenomics of Web Development” — a controlled comparison of 23 web technologies, 115 idiomatic snippets, one tokenizer.
Nobody picks a markup format. It arrives with the framework you already chose, and after that you write it for years without a second thought about what it costs.
That was fine while the only reader was a person. Now paste a component into Claude or Cursor and ask for one more field, one different breakpoint. Look at what you actually sent: a wrapper, a tree of tags, a dozen class attributes, and somewhere in there, the two lines you cared about. On most frontend requests, the bulk of what you send is presentation, not logic, and it is the layer nobody has priced.
In Part 1 five frontend frameworks came out 38% apart. In Part 2 five languages came out 63% apart. Markup is worse than both: 94%...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to hackernoon.com. To see the full text click HERE
