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A dynamic visualization on the web 13 years ago? He may have been the first.

• osteele 9y ago
  It was pretty hard to do viz on the web 13 years ago. In 2006 I made a web tool to turn regular expressions into NFAs and DFAs and animate their states as you typed. It took a lot of code (drawing and animating along beziers, AJAX to a server for graphviz and a regex compilation and minimization package I wrote for this). https://imgur.com/gallery/Yqqoh https://imgur.com/gallery/Yqqoh These days there’s a lot more tooling and components that can snap together to make this kind of thing.
• dspillett 9y ago
  > A dynamic visualization on the web 13 years ago? Depends on what you count as dynamic, but I think so yes. There was one in use at my Uni ~2000. Obviously there were no fancy canvas/svg options to work with client-side (though IIRC flash was very much a thing by then so that could have been used) so it produced an image server-side that was updated when you submitted a change. Not entirely dynamic due to the manual post to the server for each update of the diagram, but it counts IMO. It could have been more automated via the JS/Dom methods available at the time I'm sure, I can think of a couple of ways, but I don't remember it being so. > He may have been the first. I'd say not the first. He may well have come up with the combination of ideas independently. How many times have you thought "X would be brilliant, I'm a genius" only to find when describing the idea to other that several "geniuses" preempted you and it already exists (or worse: it has been tried and proven to be a terrible idea in practice)! It has certainly happened to me a fair few times, and back then it wouldn't have been as easy to search out similar ideas/implementations.