What would make explorables really take off is a killer framework to make building them easier, ala Ruby on Rails.

I know ncase has built some frameworks and I applaud his work, but this space just needs a lot more investment.

Here's what I think the killer framework will do really, really well: (Note this is VERY rough, it comes from spending 20 minutes trying to create an explorable a long time ago and realizing that the tooling just isn't right)

- 1) Turn the act of coding a model into mostly verbal reasoning by having a great framework language / API. Rails actually did this, turning the entire building a website into composing english. It greatly reduced the distance between the concepts / app that you were building and how you went about building it - i.e. Model has_many :users

- 2) A standardized convention on inputs, outputs, relationships, defaults, and time (step functions).

- 2b) A standardized convention of defining one unit, populations and groups of units within populations

- 3) Automated scaffolding to display raw data, with add-on libraries to easily scaffold formatted or visual data.

- 3b) Automated scaffold to visualize a unit, a population, groups within populations, and units within groups (a scaffold of a population is like table rows)

- 3c) Language / api should also make it dead simple and intuitive to control converting from numerical data to textual data. i.e. if you are modeling stress, what does 60 points in stress mean?

I think something inspired by ActiveModel (my Rails bias is showing) would be a great way to define the above since defining a strong way to define your data is also how you would get automatic scaffolding language and high level functions on top of it.

- 4) A dead simple way to display and embed models anywhere. 1 line of javascript or a 1 line import and you can plug it into jekyll, hugo, (any static site generator, really)

- 5) A killer tutorial.