Feature Request: Rabbit hole links?

[brownsarahm]

I do not know exactly how it is implemented or have any idea how hard it would be, but mystmd has a cool feature that you can hover over and get more info about what is at the target of a link without leaving the current page. live demo above a video of the feature.

It works for both cross references within the project and for specific external links.

If something similar could be added to the workbench it could make cases where we cross reference lessons a lot easier and if it was also in whatever infrastructure is used for the handbook, it could be really helpful for instructor training: making the reader experience better than a ton of links without creating the maintenance issue of having to keep text in sync.

[froggleston]

This would be quite difficult and time-consuming to implement as sandpaper understands basic markdown and Rmarkdown, but not mystmd markdown formatting.

[brownsarahm]

The rabbit hole links are not actually a part of the mystmd syntax, their syntax is that of a regular link.

As I understand it, the rabbithole links rely on an AST representation of the documents. In myst, the rendering goes markdown > AST > HTML. It seems like the pegboard XML representation might be enough to create a similar feature. It is essentially tooltips that pull in content from other places. Myst is open source, so their html/js to do the visual part is available. I think this might actually be a change only in varnish? but I have had a hard time understanding how the component libraries in the workbench fit together.