Introducing Source Viewers

30 Nov 2023

Today we’re releasing Source Viewers, a new component of Source Cooperative that lets you view data files served over HTTP in your browser.

Source Viewers #

Source Viewers are views into files served over HTTP intended to enable quick and easy exploration of data through your web browser. We’ve built them to make it easier for people to preview data files within Source Cooperative.

The Source Viewers library contains a collection of React components which define the file types that they are compatible with.

At launch, Source Viewers has three different viewers:

• Text Viewer - Renders plain-text files.
• Markdown Viewer - Renders markdown files as HTML.
• Map Viewer - Renders PMTiles and GeoJSON files on a slippy map.

Similar to your operating system’s file explorer, the Source Viewer allows you to open a file in all viewers that are compatible with that file type. For example, you can view a markdown file rendered in Markdown and rendered as plain text.

Contributions welcome #

Source Viewers is an open-source library and we welcome all contributions to this project!

If there’s a file type that is not currently supported, you can follow this guide and create a viewer yourself.

Demo site #

The Source Viewers demo site lets you explore and interact with data anywhere on the web through your browser, as long as it’s accessible through HTTP.

This site operates independently of the main Source Cooperative site, but both sites utilize the same Source Viewers library so you can use the demo site to see how a file will be visualized before you upload it to Source.

Demo site examples:

• The Google-Microsoft Open Buildings PMTiles file.
• A README.md file rendered in Markdown and rendered as plain text.