Support `.dib` notebook rendering in GitHub

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. When creating .NET Interactive notebooks with the .dib file format, I would like to upload the notebooks to GitHub and/or GitHub Gist to share direct links to or embed in webpages.

Describe the solution you’d like I would like the .dib format to render in the browser just as .ipynb notebooks render. This Gist contains the same content in .dib and .ipynb formats, and only the latter renders.

The major benefit of the render is that Gists can be easily embedded, such as in blogs, and .ipynb notebooks are still rendered when embedded.

Describe alternatives you’ve considered Convert the .dib format notebooks to the .ipynb format. However, I prefer the .dib format since the raw format is much more concise and readable. I also prefer not having the Python association in my notebook file names. 🙂

A related discussion thread is https://github.com/dotnet/interactive/issues/467, but I thought it would be good having a separate issue tracking this. It isn’t clear to me how one gets custom file formats to render on GitHub. From my searching, it appears that GitHub doesn’t expose a public method to do this and needs to implement the rendering themselves. Maybe the .NET Interactive team would have to collaborate with the GitHub team on that internally?

The only documents I found were:

• https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/working-with-files/using-files/working-with-non-code-files
• https://github.blog/2015-05-07-github-jupyter-notebooks-3/
• https://blog.jupyter.org/rendering-notebooks-on-github-f7ac8736d686

[bmitc]

That is really too bad. Is there any way that GitHub opens up the possibility for someone to help implement it for them?

I consider this a major feature for Microsoft’s Polyglot Notebooks. *.ipynb notebooks are ill-suited for source-code control, but they get rendered in GitHub. *.dib notebooks are great for source-code control but do not render in GitHub. It’s often better to just throw out caring about how much *.ipynb notebooks pollute source-code control since the feature of being rendered in GitHub is fantastic for linking others to a notebook.

[ScottArbeit]

@xperiandri Trying to find the right team internally to comment. 99% sure GitHub has to write that code, can’t be done by a third-party.