The mechanics of self-contained HTML delivery — inlining, exporting, file size, viewing, and choosing the right format.
A Claude artifact looks self-contained inside the chat and often isn't. The five things that quietly stay external — CDN scripts, Tailwind, fonts, images, fetch calls — and how to inline each.
There is no single number — it depends on the model, the image size, and whether you send a PDF as text or pixels. The per-model formulas, real measured costs, and how to count it for your own model.
Three formats people reach for by habit, built for three different jobs. A job-by-job map of when Markdown, HTML, or PDF is the right shape — and why they work best as a pipeline, not a choice.
Feeding a document to an AI? Markdown almost always costs fewer tokens and parses cleaner than the same content as a PDF. Where each format wins — and why the thing you hand a person at the end is neither.
PDF is built for archive and print. HTML is built for live, browser-native delivery. Where the three differences — interactivity, weight, single source of truth — actually decide which format ships.
How analysts, consultants, and agency teams hand a finished HTML report to one named client — what each channel is built for, and where private-link hosting fits.