When opening an HTML file that sits on your desktop, IE will throw a security warning which you must click before the page is rendered. This is annoying, especially when the file is your own creation and there is no security risk. You can suppress the security warning by adding the "Mark Of The Web" (MOTW) to the top of your HTML document:

<!-- saved from url=(0014)about:internet -->

After adding this, you can launch the HTML file locally without any annoying warnings.