Improve utility of documentation through interactivity

[trallard]

📝 Summary

Interactive project documentation can potentially engage less experienced users, lower project entry barriers, and be a valuable resource for schools to teach ecosystem libraries. The Binder project showed the value of this approach but cannot sustain the loads placed upon it by ecosystem-wide documentation. Instead of cloud infrastructure, it has recently become possible to host computation inside readers’ web browsers through JupyterLite or PyScript.

We will work with the developers of these tools to integrate them seamlessly into project documentation and accelerate their adoption. We will make Pyodide, the underlying technology, a supported platform of Scientific Python core projects through build system & packaging improvements. We will also implement and propagate a best-practice pattern for serverless, low-maintenance demonstration widgets in project websites.

🚀 Tasks / Deliverables

See all issues labelled as mission: interactive docs ⚡️

📋 Additional information & resources

• https://github.com/executablebooks/thebe/issues/585 -> primarily work around thebe-light, which will be a version of thebe that ships with JupyterLite and a WASM kernel
• Binder documentation
• https://github.com/jupyterhub/binderhub/
• JupyterLite documentation
• PyScript website

[ademidun]

Very interesting idea @trallard! Can you please hyperlink "The Binder Project" so people can have a reference to learn what the Binder project is. It'd also be helpful to have a link for "showed the value of this approach" so we can see some examples of how it was useful.

I really like the idea of interactivity and pushing computation to client-side and web and want to learn more about this. Great idea!

[betatim]

Can you please hyperlink "The Binder Project" so people can have a reference to learn what the Binder project is

Take a look at mybinder.org (a live instance) and github.com/jupyterhub/binderhub/ which is the code behind it.

[melissawm]

Some community notes from the 2024 Scientific Python Dev Summit: https://hackmd.io/@melissawm/interactive_docs