Clicking <a/> tag links in embedded Observable notebooks does nothing

[metaphorz]

I tried the demo Colab jupyter notebook. Given this cell:

embed('@d3/gallery')

one cannot click on a map type and have an execution. Nothing
happens. Is that intended or is there a workaround?

The cell before that one works fine and allows for interactive control.

[thomasballinger]

That's interesting, it looks like these are links (<a href="" /> tags) with relative href destinations. I can't left-click them at all, but I can cmd-click or right-click and "Open Link in New Tab," but since the link is /@d3/animated-treemap that doesn't send me to the right place.

Clicking doing nothing is not intended, I want to understand that better. I wonder if single clicks to localhost are blocked or something? Maybe on Colab (Colab sticks the already-iframed Observable output in another iframe), maybe everywhere?

The part that might be intended, we have to decide, is the link going to the wrong places. Where should a link to /@d3/animated-treemap send users? Maybe it should always be relative to https://observablehq.com, so that this behavior always matches.

[thomasballinger]

I think that this embedded notebook and any other Observable documentation notebooks are best viewed at https://observablehq.com and that should be where we sent users generally, so in this case https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery — but for users' notebooks this is still an important thing to fix.

[metaphorz]

Thanks. I am positive about observeablehq in general and have used it. I used Processing/JS
for some tests. For the past 6 months, though,
I have been using Google Colab for machine learning work. And, so the idea of a blend of
observable and colab is exciting.

[thomasballinger]

That's great to hear, I hope you find this library useful! I think it's a great blend, I like to build a visualization in Observable using data I upload as a File Attachment then swap out that data with live data in a Colab notebook. You can see some examples here: #2