[IPython-dev] Re: Notebook roadmap

[Toni Alatalo]

Robert Kern wrote:

Hello,

> Fernando Perez wrote:
>
>> Robert, is your code available anywhere?  This could be used as a 
>> starter by Toni on the document work, as well as providing Tzanko a 
>> mockup target to load.
>
> And some documentation to boot:
> http://www.scipy.org/wikis/featurerequests/NoteBookXML


That and the discussions here have been something to digest indeed, but 
the picture is pretty clear for me now (as in understanding the targets 
and the Robert's implementation).

Where next? Tzanko, can you interface with the 'notabene' API, is there 
something to discuss about it, or things missing I could start to add?

Some random remarks from reading the code:

- i also like the target of ReST output, and now we perhaps don't need 
to write that ourselves, 'cause a xhtml2rest 'renderer' was recenlty 
posted to docutils-dev. added a comment about that to the wiki page with 
a link to the code and discussions at 
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.text.docutils.devel/3076

- don't know how important writing notebooks as ReST will be (as 
sketched in sketch.nbk), but there some docutils directive would be nice 
for adding the code snippets (cells). .. python:  ..even? as XML is not 
for humans to write.. (and hardly even to read). and of course the 
ipython log would be also nicer to read in a non-XML format, e.g. like 
it originally shows in the ipython prompt or something (this is a bit 
strangely inverse, 'cause rst was originally planned to be written in 
.py files, but here it's vice versa..?)

- the 'ipython monkeypatch' seems to work (except that unlike the 
example shows a name attribute for the Notebook is required - would it 
be better to add some default name for notebooks, or keep requiring that 
and fix the docstring?). am happy that didn't have to write that :o

Hm, i feel like am missing all the important issues that do lurk 
somewhere in the back of the mind, but those are at least some concrete 
points -- i guess when we get actually going with experimenting with a 
prorotype etc. they surface.

So ideas about what to tackle next would be very welcome. Still this 
morning I was not totally convinced if Robert's approach was the way to 
go, but now it seems like that again. Thanks a lot for putting it together!

~Toni