Interface for non-Jupyter notebooks

[cadojo]

Context

Pluto.jl has a huge following in the Julia community. It would be really cool if there was a standard "executable books" interface for non-Jupyter notebooks.

Proposal

I'm proposing a documented interface which jupyter-book follows so non-Jupyter notebooks could be built.

I spend a lot of time within the Julia community, so my knowledge and background are a bit biased towards Julia, but I know that Julia folks are working on standardized educational content. For example, a lot of work has been done to add HTML metadata to Pluto notebooks so that metadata can be parsed on websites.

I know non-Jupyter notebooks might seem like a silly proposal for the jupyter-book repository, but I absolutely love the vision behind "executable books". I've seen the kind of great work it enables, such as the in-progress Mathematics of Machine Learning textbook.

Tasks and updates

• [ ] Discuss. Is this a good idea? Is this kind of work part of the Executable Books organizational vision?
• [ ] Define what work would need to be completed for an interface to be defined.
• [ ] Much, much more!

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[firasm]

Hi @cadojo - I wanted to quickly point you to one thing that may be able to accomplish what you're trying to do already:

Custom notebook formats

A while ago, there was a similar request about RMarkdown files in this issue and a reasonably workable solution was introduced into Jupyterbook by the admins.

I think one way to go about this is to add functionality to the jupytext project for Pluto.jl notebooks, and then it should just work with the executable books.

For anything more first-party, will have to wait for one of the core maintainers comment. This looks super interesting though!