Compatibility with 'percent' notebook format

[westurner]

The "percent" notebook format looks similar to the pyodide notebook format [1]. It may be advantageous to adopt the percent format so that pyodide notebooks can be run in other tools? A different solution would be to add "pyodide format" (?) to jupytext.

Jyve (JupyterLab as WASM with pyiodide) does not yet support jupytext and so does not yet support the 'percent' format: pyodide/pyodide#431

From [1] https://jupytext.readthedocs.io/en/latest/formats.html#the-percent-format :

---

The percent format

The percent format is a representation of Jupyter notebooks as scripts, in which all cells are explicitely delimited with a commented double percent sign # %%. The percent format is currently available for these languages.

The format was introduced by Spyder in 2013, and is now supported by many editors, including

• Spyder IDE,
• Hydrogen, a package for Atom,
• VS
  Code,
• Python Tools for Visual Studio,
• and PyCharm Professional.

Our implementation of the percent format is as follows: cells can have

• a title
• a cell type (markdown, md or raw, omitted for code cells)
• and cell metadata
  like in this example:

# %% Optional title [cell type] key="value"

In the percent format, our previous example becomes:

# %% [markdown]
# This is a multiline
# Markdown cell

# %% [markdown]
# Another Markdown cell


# %%
# This is a code cell
class A():
    def one():
        return 1

    def two():
        return 2

In the case of Python scripts, Markdown cells do accept multiline comments:

# %% [markdown]
"""
This is a Markdown cell
that uses multiline comments
"""

---

Whereas pyodide format looks like this:

%% py
import this

%% js
console.log("hello");

The percent format looks like this:

# %% [python]
import this

# %%
import this

[rth]

Thanks for opening this issue. I'm also fond of percent script and jupytext.

Pyodide doesn't handle the notebook formats though, https://github.com/iodide-project/iodide does. Maybe @wlach could transfer it there ( "Transfer issue" button on the bottom right)..

[wlach]

@westurner interesting had not heard of this before! note that iodide is basically in extreme maintenance mode at the moment

[westurner]

Wasn't sure what level of resources were currently being contributed to this excellent project.

For students, "open a URL in a browser", wait for the initial download, and use local system resources is far more practical than starting with time-consuming environment provisioning on each and every platform or finding the money to run a JupyterHub/BinderHub setup that scales to all students; especially when there are ample resources on the clients for most tasks.

Though containers can make provisioning trivial, admin access as a requirement is maybe not practical for all students.

If pyiodide (or Jyve) could write to other storage APIs (e.g. Dropbox, GDrive), that would solve for very many students' needs for a better calculator that people actually work with in workplaces.

E.g. Khan Academy has ProcessingJS CS exercises and edtech funding.

Is pyiodide hostable as static HTML on e.g. GH Pages or a CDN? Could there be pluggable storage and grading API adapters?