Paste HTML, see it live.

Rendering HTML without saving a file

The normal way to see what a piece of HTML looks like is to save it as a file, find it, and open it in a browser — three steps that are entirely out of proportion to the question being asked, which is usually just "does this look right?". Pasting the markup here renders it immediately, and closing the tab is the cleanup.

It is worth being clear about the difference between viewing rendered output and viewing source, because the two get confused. Rendered output is what a browser draws: the headings, the layout, the images. Source is the markup itself. This shows you the first from the second, which is what you want when you are holding a block of HTML and trying to work out what it produces.

The situations this suits are mostly small and frequent. Checking an email template before it goes out, when the sending platform has no preview. Previewing markup scraped from a page or exported by a CMS. Working out what an unfamiliar snippet from a documentation page actually renders. Showing someone the difference between two structures while explaining them. None of these are worth a file on disk.

A practical limit to know about: markup that depends on external stylesheets, fonts, scripts or images from another site will render without them. What you see is the structure and whatever inline styling the snippet carries, not the finished design as it would appear in its original context. For checking layout, semantics and content that is usually exactly what you want; for judging a full page design, it is not the whole picture.

The markup is rendered in the browser and never uploaded, which is the reason to prefer this over pasting client work, an unreleased template or anything containing real customer data into a random online tool.