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Dear HN: I wrote an SVG charting library. What do you think?
- davidw 17y agoThe 'available graph types' need to be linked to examples.
- kilian 17y agoGood idea, just did so :)
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- revorad 17y agoHey Killian, that looks nice. How do you get this to work in IE? I tried to look at the examples in IE7, but it just froze.
- kilian 17y agoThe example page has 25 graphs it tries to generate all onload, IE can't handle that at once. It could be fixed using a queueing function but I haven't written one yet. IE can handle it fine (slower, but fine) if you use just a couple of graphs.
- wisty 17y agoNice documentation, and nice looking graphs.
- fmeyer 17y agoGreat job killian, I was looking for something exactly like this. =)
- qjz 17y agoVery nice, but I don't see any way to generate a legend. I'll probably need to cut the graphs from a screenshot for my less technically oriented superiors, so a legend is mandatory. I love the sparkline support, btw.
- ig1 17y agoMy main problem with javascript graphing libraries in general is that there's no way to copy & paste the graph into facebook, forums, etc. And if you're a data orientated site then visitors from shared graphs, etc. are going to make up a significant percentage of your traffic. If it's not easy for people to share your graphs then you're just giving away a lot of free traffic.
- freetard 17y agohttp://www.jqplot.com/ http://www.jqplot.com/ makes use of canvas and every browser that support canvas has a function to export them to bmp.
- ZeroGravitas 17y agoI've wondered when an opinionated charting library would appear and gently guide people away from pie charts. Apple dropped a couple of notches in my estimation when they brought out iWork and 3-D woodgrain pie-charts were proudly displayed.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- al_james 17y agoWhat's wrong with pie charts? For certain datasets and views they are perfect. What's more, people understand them.
- kilian 17y agoPeople think they understand them, but piecharts are hard to understand because you can't differentiate between a 24% and a 25% slice. Read a far better explanation here: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/save_the_pies_for_dessert.pdf http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intel... They are perfect for a very, very limited set of datasets: if you have a very large slice and a number of small slices and want to show the obvious difference.
- al_james 17y agoUmmm... I think you can make that argument for ANY chart type. I can't differentiate between 25% and 24% in a bar graph either. In fact, IMO, bar charts (normally) have the far worse problem of being relative to the largest value. In a percentage situation, you want the size of the bars to be relative to the whole, otherwise its misleading to say the least... So the take away fact is that all visualisations have weaknesses under certain conditions. But to offer graphing library that does not offer pie charts is, well, a bit silly in my opinion.
- lmkg 17y agoAs an analyst, I find that the difference between 24% and 25% rarely matters in practice. Pie charts are useful for showing that big differences are big, and that unimportant things are unimportant. Most other uses require a notion of absolute size of the pie in addition to breakdown, which can be communicated in a pie chart, but it's harder.
- cmelbye 17y agoVery nice! This will be perfect to use in my project. Thanks!
- adamt 17y agoIt looks really nice and I've been looking for a while for something like this. However, until it supports IE properly are things like this useful? IE (combined) is still 62% of browsers. Don't get me wrong - it's a great concept. But it has to work on the most common browser.
- bmelton 17y agoThere are plugins for SVG that IE users can install, that would make this work, and be useful. That said, it IS a plugin that a lot of people aren't likely to have already installed.
- simonw 17y agoTake a look at http://code.google.com/p/svgweb/ http://code.google.com/p/svgweb/ - it renders SVG inside a Flash widget, providing compatibility with IE without the need for a separate plugin.
- kilian 17y agoThis works in IE, it uses Raphael ( http://www.raphaeljs.com http://www.raphaeljs.com ) so IE gets VML :) IE is noticeably slower though.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- ntulip 17y agovery nice.
- wensing 17y agoYour spark____ examples need retooling. The point of a spark is information density. In the sparkline example(s) you have 7 data points across 75+ horizontal pixels (i.e. very low information density).
- kilian 17y agocheck the sparkarea example, it has a lot more. You control the datapoints and the width, so it's all up to the person implementing it.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- danskil 17y agoI like it. though wish it was one written for Jquery
- scorchin 17y agoThat looks cool. I'd use it more if you could export the SVG file once it's rendered. Oh, and a gantt chart layout would be cool too!