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Comment by qwertox | Hacker News Reader

My issue with Observable is that it appears to be the examples-resource for d3 [0], but you can't just copy-paste the code because it is designed to run in that framework.

And it's not like d3 is easy to use so that you can use it without examples, specially considering that changes between versions are often incompatible.

But apart from this, there's a lot of incredible graphics to find on the site.

[0] https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery

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100%. Was never able to get past the fact that it's slightly just not quite actual JS. Close enough to the base language that it seems they could have easily used JS, probably with some additional APIs for showing graphics.

That's one of the biggest features of Observable Framework compared to regular Observable: it's just vanilla JavaScript now.

Fair point, I hadn't made the distinction in my mind. Perhaps that resolves my previous qualms.

Some community members have made available resources for converting Observable flavoured JS to vanilla (it mostly involves rewriting top-level cell definitions):

[0]: https://observablehq.com/@bumbeishvili/convert-observable-co...

Yup, I find that incredibly frustrating -- it's a platform lock-in that any corp would be proud of.

I've had this gripe more with ObservableHQ notebooks -- great examples and a pointless resource all at the same time.

This framework effort seems to be a bit more open though (at least you can self-host), so I'm keeping an eye on it.

with alex garcia's dataflow it has been possible for some time to self-host observablehq notebooks without proprietary software: https://github.com/asg017/dataflow

i, embarrassingly, haven't tried it

This does not seem to be an issue with Observable (more an issue with d3 that it has not chosen to have copy-pastable examples elsewhere), but in any case this comment does not seem relevant to this post, as this post is precisely about how the new Observable Framework removes some of the earlier problems with Observable notebooks (“It’s all just standard JavaScript now—no custom syntax” etc).

Like if Microsoft for some reason decided to put all their Azure examples in files that opened in MS Paint, imagine a “My issue with Paint is that…” comment like the above. You should judge MS Paint by how good it is for its stated purpose, not by how it gets in the way when you're not trying to use it. It makes no sense to say “My issue with X is that Y uses it and...” (that would an issue with Y) especially on a post that's about Z and how it's different from X.

In this case, Observable Framework is an open-source static-site generator that runs on your machine and uses standard Javascript, so really don't understand what's the connection to specific hosted Observable notebooks.

(But I guess it's of some interest/disappointment to the Observable folks that at least some people are encountering their Observable project mainly in the context of looking for d3 examples.)

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