hey folks! This may be the closest thing to heresy on this Slack, but here goes: I have a friend who works for a government hydrology agency, which is very much wedded to (poorly source-controlled, emailed around)

.ipynb

files. He was interested in the Observable suite, but just didn't think he could shift the culture to a spot where that would be tenable. That got me thinking: can we embed the Observable library suite in just plain-old HTML files, independent of the Notebooks or Framework environment. Turns out its not that hard to reconstruct a notebook-ish experience: https://maxbo.me/a-html-file-is-all-you-need.html I wonder if a library that would make this easier would be appreciated in some organizations or existing workflows.

Not sure if I understand the objection but you could email around

.md

Observable Framework files? What is the point of resistance? Observable Framework is open-source and a file-based development workflow like Jupyter.

@Mike Bostock I'm not sure I understood the objection either - he handwaved away the recommendation that Framework would be perfect for the team, something about a security approval process that would take too long so I took it at face value and tried to give him a 3rd alternative

Well, thanks for trying. 🙂 People may assume that Framework requires using the Observable platform, but you can use it entirely locally and offline!