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by 1dom 319 days ago
I'm not sure I understand what the offering is here. I read the website, and watched the video, but it doesn't really make sense.

Is Notebook 2.0 just a HTML subset that starts with e.g. <notebook> instead of <html>?

Then what's the notebook kit npm package?

Then there's an editor?

I've come away from the page a little irritated, because starts with hyperbole like "the future of notebooks is here", and then the "hello world" in the new notebook 2.0 format looks like HTML, and a video of what could have just been a generic AI chat window.

Maybe I'm too hungry/tired to make sense of it right now. Will be interesting to read what others think.
2 comments
skybrian 319 days ago
They probably could have explained better what hasn’t changed. Observable Notebooks work like a spreadsheet or makefile. The cells aren’t executed top to bottom (like a Jupyter Notebook). Instead they’re executed in dependency order.

Looks like this is still true with the new system:

> The Build API analyzes cell source code to find unbound references, such that the appropriate variable graph can be initialized using the Observable Runtime. For non-JavaScript cells (such as Markdown, HTML, and SQL), the Build API also transpiles the source into a tagged template literal expression.

This is unlike other document formats. They made the cells look like standard JavaScript now (versus the JavaScript variant they had before) but the file format is necessarily different, because the execution model is different. There is a build step to ensure that the cells will be executed in the right order on page load.

link
chaps 319 days ago
Have a look at https://observablehq.com/@observablehq and just poke around.

It's a neat tool that solves a lot of specific sharing/visualization problems (think of newsroom data analysis).

I like observable but I hate how much it feels like the service has been taken over by product managers looking for that next bump.

link