One of the foundational principles of the web, though I suspect ever fewer people know it, is that you can “View Source” on a web page to see what bits of HTML, Javascript and CSS are used to create it.

In the WordPress editor I’m currently writing in, I’m using a Text view that lets me write vanilla HTML; but there is also a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) view that shows how the interpreted HTML text will look when it is rendered in the browser as a web page.

Reflecting on IPython Markdown Opportunities in IPython Notebooks and Rstudio, it struck me that the Rmd (Rmarkdown) view used in RStudio, the HTML preview of “executed” Rmd documents generated from Rmd by knitr and the interactive Jupyter (IPython, as was) notebook view can be seen as standing in this sort of relation to each other:

From that, it’s not too hard to imagine RStudio offering the following sort of RStudio/IPython notebook hybrid interface – with an Rmd “text” view, and with a notebook “visual” view (eg via an R notebook kernel):

And from both, we can generate the static HTML preview view.

In terms of underlying machinery, I guess we could have something like this:

I’m looking forward to it:-)