How to share an HTML file so it opens as a page, not as code

The one-minute answer: turn the file into a link

Open the HTML viewer, paste the code or drop the .html file on it, and press Get a link to send. You get an address that opens the page in any browser, on any phone, for the next 24 hours. No account, no upload form, no card.

That is the whole route for one finished page. The rest of this article explains why the file you already sent arrived as code, what the link does, and what to do when the page has several files or has to stay up longer than a day.

1. Step 1Paste or dropPut the HTML in the viewer. The preview draws in your own browser and nothing is sent yet.
2. Step 2Check the pageScroll it and click the links the way the reader will.
3. Step 3Get the linkPress the button, copy the address, send it. It opens for 24 hours.

Why the file arrives as code

A browser shows a page when it can fetch it from an address. An attachment is not an address, it is a file, and every route that hands the recipient a file runs into the same wall.

Double-click an .html file on your own computer and it opens at a file:// address. That address points at your disk, so it works for you and for nobody else. Sending the file does not send the address.

Email delivers the file, but the phone decides what opens it. Gmail's list of blocked attachment types does not include .html or .htm (Gmail Help), so the message arrives. What the recipient sees next depends on their device: one phone renders it, another shows the source, a third offers a download and then nothing.

Cloud drives used to be the answer, and the forum threads that rank for this question still say so. They stopped being the answer years ago:

• Dropbox: free accounts lost HTML rendering on public links on October 3, 2016; Plus and team accounts on September 1, 2017, when the Public folder was disabled (Dropbox Help). Today "shared links don't render HTML content in a web browser" (Dropbox Help).
• Google Drive: web hosting of HTML was deprecated on August 31, 2015 and switched off a year later (Google Workspace Updates).
• OneDrive: a shared .html file downloads instead of opening. In a 2023 Microsoft Q&A thread the recipients "were downloading the index.html file and seeing the raw HTML code"; the answer was that "OneDrive isn't a web server" (Microsoft Q&A, a community answer, not Microsoft documentation).

So the advice "right-click, copy public link" describes a feature that no longer exists, and "Google Drive should work" describes one that ended in 2016. The recipient needs an address that a server answers. That is what the link from the viewer is.

What the link is

The address shows the document exactly as you pasted it. Above it sits one line saying the page lives 24 hours, and over it the small "Made with Birta" mark that every free page carries. Anyone with the link opens it, with no sign-in and no invitation to sign in.

The page is not listed anywhere. Search engines are told not to index it, and the address is derived from the document itself, so it cannot be guessed from another page's address. Paste the same document again and you get the same link; change one character and you get a new page with a new link. The 24 hours count from the first time the link was asked for, and opening the page does not extend them.

After 24 hours the link stops opening. If the page has to outlive that, the step is in the last section: keep it in an account before the day is out.

The routes, side by side

Pick by what the recipient has to do next.

The last row is the ordinary path for a page that is a site: a folder with index.html and everything it refers to, published at an address you keep. It has its own guide, how to host an HTML file online for free, including what has to travel with the file and why the main one is called index.html.

When the page has several files

A pasted document travels alone. If you select a stylesheet, a script or an image as a separate file, the viewer refuses it and says so; a folder or an archive is refused the same way. There are two ways out.

If an assistant wrote the page, ask it to put the styles and the script inside the one HTML file and to embed the images or link to ones already online. Most pages an assistant produces are a single file already, which is why the viewer fits them.

If the page is really several files, publish the folder from an account instead. The walkthrough is publishing a website from a folder; if the code is sitting in a chat rather than on disk, HTML to URL has the prompt that makes the assistant do the publishing.

When it has to stay up

Press Keep it in my account, on the page itself or in the result box under the viewer. After you sign in or register, the page becomes the first version of a new project with a permanent address. The temporary link keeps working until its day is out, and the project lives on separately; two people can each keep the same page and get two independent projects.

From there it is an ordinary site of yours. Each version you publish keeps its own address, so a link you sent last week still shows what it showed last week. The person you send it to can leave remarks directly on the page, pinned to the element, without an account of their own, and your assistant reads them and makes the changes. If the page needs your own domain, that is the step onto the first paid plan.

Pages that started as an assistant's artifact have one more thing to know: a published artifact is not yet a website, and the link route above is the shortest way to give it an address of its own.

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