File extensions .html -> .ohq.html

[GordonSmith]

Just wondering if it would be sensible to have a naming convention of xxx.ohq.html which would simplify the ability to associate notebook files with specific applications / code editors + extensions?

[mcmcclur]

Honestly, I don't quite understand the .html extension for the input files. Even if the input is legal HTML, shouldn't we want to distinguish between input and output more clearly?

[mbostock]

A compound extension such as .observable.html sounds reasonable; it would be nice to double-click on a notebook to open it in Desktop, and I wouldn’t want to bind Desktop to all HTML files.

A big reason I picked .html is that you automatically get syntax highlighting and editor affordances for editing notebooks in code editors, including GitHub and other source-hosting platforms. (This helps at least for the notebook structure and for JavaScript cells — conventional editors don’t understand and support Markdown and HTML “scripts” yet.) I don’t want to lose that, so the compound extension approach is attractive. Perhaps we should also have a <!doctype notebook> to more formally delineate notebooks from web pages.

You should be able to open and save notebooks with a compound extension .html already today. But I’m guessing that maybe routing in Vite is wrong, because Vite won’t know to look for a index.observable.html or whatever.observable.html when serving / or /whatever, respectively. I imagine that’s easy to fix if someone wants to investigate.