17 September 2026

A shared document says where it came from

Somebody who opens a link you shared now finds a line at the foot of it about what made the page, and a way to convert something of their own. The downloaded .html carries the same line, quietly, in its footer. Nothing about the document itself changed.

Somebody who opens a link you sent has no reason to know what made the page they are reading. It is a document at an address, with no menu and no product around it — which is deliberate, and left a reader with nowhere to go when what they wanted was to do the same thing with a file of their own.

What is at the foot of a shared page

One line under the document: that it is a shared document, when it was converted, and a link to report it if it should not be public. Under that, a short block naming what made the page, what the site converts, and two links — one to the converter, one to the account that keeps documents.

Nothing above the document moved. The card at the top is the same card the app puts over any document — the name, what it weighs, when it was made, the counts — with Save to your account and Download .html where they were.

The downloaded file carries the line too

The self-contained .html ends with the document's name, when it was converted, and made with TransformPipe. That file is the one that gets emailed and opened on a machine with no network, so the line is text and a link and nothing else: no script, no image, no web font. The shared page runs no script either — it is HTML rendered once on the way out.

Why the foot and not the top

A shared link is somebody else's document, and the top of it belongs to them. A banner over the first paragraph would be an advertisement in the middle of something a colleague sent to be read, and the document is the reason the page exists.

What it does not do

It does not change the document. The Markdown, the HTML and every heading, table and link in them are exactly what they were, so a link you shared last month renders the same today. The two links carry ?from=shared and ?from=file in the address, and that marker is the whole of what is added — no identifier for the reader, no request to anywhere, nothing written to their browser.