How to distinguish normal notebooks from MyST notebooks?

[kolibril13]

Context

It might happen that a user opens a MyST notebook without having MyST installed.
And the user might not even know that jupyterlab-myst exists.
Is there a way to indicate that the notebook is a jupyterlab-myst notebook?

Proposal

One way to give a hint that it's a jupyterlab-myst notebook would be to write it in the notebook metadata on saving.

And just another thought:
Would it even be possible to have a button: "Download myst renderer" that downloads and runs the JavaScript on the fly, without having the jupyterlab-myst plugin installed? That would make myst notebooks more portable.

Tasks and updates

No response

[rowanc1]

There is some movement in Jupyter to better define the markdown variant in use:

• Pre-proposal: Specify the Markdown cell's markdown flavor jupyter/enhancement-proposals#98

This would allow better error messages about which renderer to use, and at least alert users to the fact that they should install something.

We have also registered MyST with IANA, to be an official markdown variant:

• Register MYST as an official markdown variant with IANA myst-spec#58

Steps in that direction at least! 🚀

[agoose77]

This is a good question, and something we're discussing in several arenas at once, including

• Discussion: Rethinking notebook cell types jupyter/enhancement-proposals#95
• First draft markdown flavor JEP jupyter/enhancement-proposals#99
• Add JEP for adding $schema to notebook format jupyter/enhancement-proposals#97

The big picture is that right now we're under-standardised here.

Would it even be possible to have a button: "Download myst renderer" that downloads and runs the JavaScript on the fly, without having the jupyterlab-myst plugin installed? That would make myst notebooks more portable.

This has some overlap with the rich-outputs ES6 work that was recently discussed at a widgets workshop. There's no similar analogue for Markdown, but that falls under the idea that we need to augment the notebook format to encode this information.