2 ms·

I don't think that's entirely fair. For instance, I host content on my personal website [0] that is written in using Observable, and in fact the site provides

by RobinL 6y ago

I don't think that's entirely fair. For instance, I host content on my personal website [0] that is written in using Observable, and in fact the site provides guides to allow anyone to export content[1] and embed elsewhere online. My content can be entirely under my control if I save my libraries out of the Observable API as a tarball[2]. I genuinely think the differences between Observable and 'pure' javascript are driven by the vision for a more powerful way of using javascript for rapid prototyping, rather than any attempt to make it proprietary. I think these ideas are revolutionary and Observable is one of my favourite working environments as a data scientist. I also think that Mike Bostock has shown good faith, and dedication to the open source community through decades of work, which he's always given away for free. With all that said, if ObservableHQ and its API were to disappear overnight, the lack of an editing environment would make it difficult to update existing content and so I think there is space for a offline version of the editor. As far as I understand it, nothing's stopping a third party building this. [0]https://www.robinlinacre.com/energy-usage/ https://www.robinlinacre.com/energy-usage/ [1]https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/downloading-and-embedding-notebooks https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/downloading-and-embed... [2]https://github.com/RobinL/robinl.github.io/tree/dev/tgz https://github.com/RobinL/robinl.github.io/tree/dev/tgz

xipho 6y ago
Thanks for the links, I completely concur with the goodness of everything you've raised. To clarify where I'm coming from, my use-case is (fully) offline. I want to mock the visualization in the service then get the raw, static JS offline to be used as a template. I'll write a Ruby wrapper around the data I'm exploring and gradually parameterize the template as I better understand it, and what my data looks like in it. I don't want to dance with details of the JS, I want to dance with details of the data and parameters, so get me out of requiring online hooks ASAP. I know this is possible because prior versions of Observable let you do exactly what I want, but now I get some super friendly/not friendly interfaces that obfuscates what I'm familiar with. As a separate issue not fully related- Ultimately my goal is a static visualization for scientific publications or presentations (I can export SVG from Observable, so my prior arguments doesn't hold here). Science has a very long shelf-life, in my field we routinely reference papers and their figures 200+ years old. While I absolutely love the idea of "living publications" I also fear life that depends on other's services. If the big people can't play nice (coughing in your direction Google services gone dark, I can think of various examples that have screwed over scientists), then you can see my caution in adopting Observable's all-in-dynamic approach.

by RobinL 6y ago

xipho 6y ago

Thanks for the links, I completely concur with the goodness of everything you've raised. To clarify where I'm coming from, my use-case is (fully) offline. I want to mock the visualization in the service then get the raw, static JS offline to be used as a template. I'll write a Ruby wrapper around the data I'm exploring and gradually parameterize the template as I better understand it, and what my data looks like in it. I don't want to dance with details of the JS, I want to dance with details of the data and parameters, so get me out of requiring online hooks ASAP. I know this is possible because prior versions of Observable let you do exactly what I want, but now I get some super friendly/not friendly interfaces that obfuscates what I'm familiar with. As a separate issue not fully related- Ultimately my goal is a static visualization for scientific publications or presentations (I can export SVG from Observable, so my prior arguments doesn't hold here). Science has a very long shelf-life, in my field we routinely reference papers and their figures 200+ years old. While I absolutely love the idea of "living publications" I also fear life that depends on other's services. If the big people can't play nice (coughing in your direction Google services gone dark, I can think of various examples that have screwed over scientists), then you can see my caution in adopting Observable's all-in-dynamic approach.