Mike Bostock and Toph Tucker talk reactivity and making code easier for humans to understand. They show the quirky syntax of Observable Notebooks 1.0, and how Notebooks 2.0 brings reactivity to standard (vanilla) syntax.
A personal reflection on the retrospective of Nathalie Magnan (1956–2016) — artist, hacktivist, and key figure in cyberfeminism. Magnan translated Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto into French, made documentaries about early internet culture (Internautes, 1995), produced tactical media, and tirelessly connected hackers, queer activists, and artists across networks.
The piece is as much about Magnan as it is about the 1990s indie web generation. Reflections on how early internet advocates were demonized by mainstream media, and how the only people who took their questions seriously were minority activists: anti-colonial, cyberfeminist, Act Up. Magnan was at that crossroads, bridging communities that would shape digital culture.
Allow me to open with a wildly speculative question: What if the internet were public interest technology? I mean "internet" the way most people understand it, which is to say our whole digital sphere, and by "public interest" I don't mean tinkering at the margins to reduce harm from some bad actors or painting some glossy ethics principles atop a pile of exploitative rent-seeking — I mean through and through, warts and all, an internet that works in support of a credible, pragmatic definition of the common good.
It’s only the first public release, rest assured we have plans to develop it beyond that point :-)
Data tables are high on the list, but it’s going to be a lot of work and I can’t say when we’ll have something to share.
In the meantime almost any library available on npm should work out of the box—not just the ones that we added explicit support for (even though of course some might need more work than others).
See the example at https://huggingface.co/spaces/observablehq/fpdn where DuckDB is used both as a data loader (to download and digest 200GB worth of source data into a small 8MB parquet file) and on the client-side to allow the user to do live search queries on the minimized data. Server-side, we're using duckdb-the-binary, and client-side we're using duckdb-wasm.
The code in a Framework can do whatever you want it to do—it can load data on demand, call an external API, etc. Precomputing data is only an option, not an obligation.
But even when you want things to be very interactive it is a good idea to minimize the data. Expose only the "rows and columns" that you need, and compress it as much as possible. This can be done in a data loader. For example, see the data app we deployed yesterday on hugging-face: its data loaders ingest a large source database (320 files totaling 200GB), and digests it into a single 8MB parquet file that we can then use on the page to "live query" 3 million newspaper titles and dates. https://huggingface.co/spaces/observablehq/fpdn