I realize now that I should have included more of an explanation of what "notebook" signified and should have included the initial comment in the Readme (or some version of it). I had the impulse to keep things absolutely as simple as possible.
I learned about how to make it easy to try a webpage from github which is useful.
I don't really have a lot invested in the result of this, but I have the feeling that people who are really trying to make a product must find that the spotlight of YC moves awfully fast.
I wonder if there needs to be a website that is a catalog of interesting projects (organized by purpose). Looking at github, it appears that it contains some lists of projects on github.
I've had the idea that this could be useful for an introduction to programming. All you need is a browser.
It also could encourage a more "literate" style of programming, much like Jupyter notebooks.
What I would wish that I could do is just make it so that there was a link to the HTML file in the Readme. Click it and there you go. My impression is that this is discouraged. (Am I wrong about that?)
As I said this is all very simple, the one thing that makes it a little bit more interesting is the save button. You can do some computations/calculations and save the results (by downloading) into the same file or a new file.
I have even modified the javascript code of the page itself and saved it away (not really directly supported).
If you download and open up the html file, it contains, what is essentially, a screenshot with explanations. (A very simple screenshot, but one you can extrapolate from.)
This is a very simple Javascript notebook in one completely self-contained HTML file. It was inspired by the concept of Jupyter notebooks.
You can enter Javascript code and execute it in the browser, completely locally and possibly offline. The performance can be pretty good.
You can put in HTML documentation and also use HTML to provide UI for simple tools.
All you need is the js+help.html file, which contains basic documentation. You can clear out the notebook and save off various javascript experiments in different files.
I have mostly used this with Chrome. I have tried it with Firefox, and also on various OSs (Linux/Windows/Mac). The main compatibility issue is the handling of the downloading of files and how that varies in different contexts.
I just recently modified this to work better for the mobile (small screen) case. I have done testing after these changes, but not extensive testing.
It is easy to extract a CSS and a JS file that could be stored separately to make for very small notebook files.
I deliberately chose the "Unlicense". (I might claim copyright, but only to discourage someone else from claiming copyright.) The coding style could probably be improved, but I wanted not to use new features to maintain compatibility with older browsers.
I will try to respond to comments and questions, but may be a little slow.
Thank you, benjaminsuch, for that pointer.