Interesting ideas in Observable Framework

published on 2024/03/04
Web

At its heart, Observable Framework is a static site generator. You give it a mixture of Markdown and JavaScript (and potentially other languages too) and it compiles them all together into fast loading interactive pages.

It ships with a full featured hot-reloading server, so you can edit those files in your editor, hit save and see the changes reflected instantly in your browser.

Once you’re happy with your work you can run a build command to turn it into a set of static files ready to deploy to a server—or you can use the npm run deploy command to deploy it directly to Observable’s own authenticated sharing platform.

Simon Willison