I strongly agree with the premise of the article - HTML could be a fabulous substrate for computational notebooks!

But I didn't love the choices for how to implement it here. Dynamic, reactive HTML can be a lot more declarative than this, and Observable is cool, but strays from standard JS.

I started to build a reactive HTML system called Heximal that eventually will have notebook support, but it's declarative, based on HTML templates and custom elements with a expression / reactivity system (based on the TC39 Signals proposal) on top.

https://github.com/elematic/heximal

It's a bit like a mashup of HTMX, Tangle, Curvenote, and Polymer. Or like HTML if were natively reactive.

I think it will lend it self to graphical editing and notebook user cases quite well.

Really cool! I particularly liked your Python and SQLite demos. I find it interesting that you started with a through-the-web (TTW) editing loop, calling it a quine. While valid, the key weakness is persistance: TidlyWiki does basically the same thing, but saving your work is a headache because basically you need another headless server process to persist anything.

Personally, when wanting to do something similar[0], started with persistance, and of course this means files. Plain text files I can edit with my programmer's editor store and distribute using the file-system. This avoids the problem of having to recapitulate a programmers editor in the browser, which is non-trivial. In turn you have the problem of writing a fast server, but that is a rather fun problem to solve [1]. You side-stepped the problem by using basic content-editable sections, but it is a huge problem, second only to persistence.

One thing I see you face which I also faced is the fact you cannot export things from inside embedded scripts! This would be a nice feature to avoid mangling the global window object. (It would also, in my use case, make code generation easier.)

0 - Literate Markdown: https://simpatico.io/lit.md

1 - Reflector, what I call the small node server that transforms, zips and caches your markdown, with a filewatcher invalidator: https://simpatico.io/reflector

With all due respect to the considerable thought and effort you put into this, the ergonomics of this approach are hideous. Why would I ever care about the styling elements when I'm just trying to do some exploratory data analysis. This is exactly why things like Jupyter notebooks excel. Regardless kudos to your curiosity and implementing alternate ideas.

The original author of Lit recently left Google and is working on something very similar to this AFAIK.

https://github.com/elematic/heximal

I enjoy the format of this post. Work from ground up to something interesting. Not tons of dependencies and framework here framework there blablabla hype.

To follow along it seems you can just copy paste the given snippets and understand step by step how it works. If I wrote something like this, I guess I would use literate programming in org-mode and export to HTML, to make it a blog post.

I still question fonts with built-in syntax highlighting.