# Heximal An HTML-first interactive document and notebook system. > [!WARNING] > Heximal is extremely experimental and incomplete. It is under active > development. ## Goals Heximal aims to be an HTML-based file format for rich, interactive, data-driven documents and computational notebooks. Heximal extends (or will extend) HTML with: - 🔣 Expressions - 🖨️ Declarative HTML templates - 🍱 Declarative custom elements - 🤹 Declarative dynamic documents: variables, scopes, bindings, I/O (🔮) - 🗄️ A library of visual and interactive components (🔮) - 🎨 Built-in CSS variables and styles for document themes (🔮) - 🔐 Security tools for sanitizing, viewing, and distributing documents (🔮) _🔮 = Future work_ Heximal's ultimate goal is to be able to describe a wide range of documents that you might create in tools like Google Docs, Notion, Observable, or Jupyter Notebook. ## Principles - Document formats should be open. This is critically important in order to allow for ownership of your own data, prevent lock-in, and enable a rich ecosystem of tools that can produce and consume documents. - The web is the ideal rendering and distribution platform for documents. The web is by far the most advanced open standard multimedia runtime, runs on the most platforms, and is the widest and most secure distribution channel for apps and documents. Building a new rendering engine or runtime for rich documents would be counter-productive. - Staying close to plain web standards is the best way to augment web technologies for rich documents. Documents should be extensible with open standards and renderable without a build step. - Documents should be self-contained in that they have explicit rather than implicit dependencies. Runtime and components should simply be imported modules. - Interactive documents are applications, and need to be secured appropriately. - Editing functionality is best separated from rendering. It takes less code and bytes to view a document than to edit it. There can be multiple editors for the same document format. Heximal will be optimized for document interchange and runtime, not necessarily for hand-written documents, so rich text formatting will be done with plain HTML and CSS, not Markdown, for instance. ## Example While blocks aren't defined yet, Heximal does have initial implementations of many of the primitives necessary for dynamic documents including expressions, templates, components, and variables. ```html

``` ## Features ### Templates Heximal Templates enhance the HTML `

Hello {{ name }}!

Messages

Hello {{ name }}!