[IPython-dev] questions about the notebook interface

[Toni Alatalo]

Toni Alatalo wrote:

this is not about ipython anymore, so i guess should move the discussion 
somewhere else .. an own list for the notebook thing perhaps (or how 
close is this work to docutils, in fact?)? but i hope you don't mind 
this so little (off-topic) update follows:

> will we have an own abstraction, notebook.title, notebook.heading 
> etc., like docutils/rst has, and 

(...)

> background = Section() #the same without (meta)class trickery
> background += "Now this is just another section, created in more 
> typical Python fashion."

spent most of the day digging around docutils, and quite like the things 
that saw. incidentally, it already has an interface that is almost 
exactly like that (i did read parts of docutils earlier too for other 
reasons, but don't think saw those areas).

managed finally to pull together a very crude first working version of a 
python file that builds a document (a docutils document object) and 
outputs it, now as html but could as well use the latex etc. writers 
(some xml seemed to be the default string representation). feel free to 
see http://an.org/programming/notebook/rest.py and if don't care to run 
it the result is http://an.org/programming/notebook/result.html (there 
is no stylesheet so the paragraph does not render quite correctly).

will (perhaps tomorrow) continue from there to have a nice syntax, 
notebook.rest wrapping those docutils details .. perhaps in the way that 
was drafted in that message yesterday -- suggestions and any comments 
welcome.

> ~Toni

same.