From static and dynamic to interactive content

From static and dynamic to interactive content#

In this section we provide a range of examples of the kinds of content that can be authored with publishing systems such as Jupyter Book and Quarto. We consider three different types of content:

  • Static content is rendered during the creation of the website/book and is kept static;

  • Dynamic content includes computational code cells that are rendered during the creation of the website/book but can be modified and re-run on demand; and

  • Interactive content provides interactive elements such as buttons, sliders, interactive figures and more. Many more examples can be found in the documentation of Quarto and Jupyter Book.

Computational infrastructure#

An important consideration when designing online teaching material is the location where the material will be hosted and served. The host capabilities may affect the type of content that can be included. For example, the content of this roadmap is being hosted as a static webpage thanks to the free service offered by GitHub pages. However, most free hosting services do not provide computational capabilities for dynamic or interactive functionalities. For instance, the Dynamic content material is visualised as a static web page by Github pages but the same content can be run by a third party server for its dynamic functionalities. Services such as MyBinder and Google Colab, offer free tier versions but they may be slow or fail to run for various reasons (e.g. connection errors or high server workload). Parts of the Interactive content of the roadmap may also require a third party service. Additional information about these requirements is specified when showcasing each example.

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