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Instead of baking your own glue, my personal recommendation is to use Semiotic by Elijah Meeks.

tracyhenry 6y ago
For simple charting, for sure use Semiotic. But D3 is a low-level library for complicated, highly customized data visualizations.
- frob 6y ago
  Semiotic goes WAY beyond simple charting. It has a wide variety of visualization frameworks which serve as bases for highly customizable graphics. I will agree that there are things one can do in d3 alone that are not supported directly by Semiotic, but I would also argue that once one plays with it a bit, Semiotic can produce the vast majority of complicated and highly customized visualizations. And I don't need to worry about DOM battles.
  - tracyhenry 6y ago
    I agree that Semiotic serves probably 80% of data vis use cases in real world. But at the end of the day it is a high-level template-based library that's less expressive than D3. If you take a random vis from observable's "trending notebooks", chances are that it is not reproducible with Semiotic. Those two libraries are really for different purposes.
  - tunesmith 6y ago
    I wish there were more (free) options for interactive Sugiyama-type graphs. So far I only know of dagre and cytoscape.
ggregoire 6y ago
Although I haven't used Semiotic but Echarts [1], I agree with the sentiment. D3 is regularly on top of HN and I always wonder if its popularity is due to people not knowing there are easier alternatives, or because plotting with a low-level library is intellectually more interesting (gotta do some maths), or because they really need a library as low-level as D3 for plotting their data. I have been using Echarts for the last 4 years on a near daily basis and I've yet to find a visualization I couldn't do with it. [1] https://github.com/apache/echarts https://github.com/apache/echarts + https://github.com/hustcc/echarts-for-react https://github.com/hustcc/echarts-for-react Some examples here: https://echarts.apache.org/examples https://echarts.apache.org/examples

For simple charting, for sure use Semiotic. But D3 is a low-level library for complicated, highly customized data visualizations.

frob 6y ago
Semiotic goes WAY beyond simple charting. It has a wide variety of visualization frameworks which serve as bases for highly customizable graphics. I will agree that there are things one can do in d3 alone that are not supported directly by Semiotic, but I would also argue that once one plays with it a bit, Semiotic can produce the vast majority of complicated and highly customized visualizations. And I don't need to worry about DOM battles.
- tracyhenry 6y ago
  I agree that Semiotic serves probably 80% of data vis use cases in real world. But at the end of the day it is a high-level template-based library that's less expressive than D3. If you take a random vis from observable's "trending notebooks", chances are that it is not reproducible with Semiotic. Those two libraries are really for different purposes.
- tunesmith 6y ago
  I wish there were more (free) options for interactive Sugiyama-type graphs. So far I only know of dagre and cytoscape.

ggregoire 6y ago

Although I haven't used Semiotic but Echarts [1], I agree with the sentiment. D3 is regularly on top of HN and I always wonder if its popularity is due to people not knowing there are easier alternatives, or because plotting with a low-level library is intellectually more interesting (gotta do some maths), or because they really need a library as low-level as D3 for plotting their data. I have been using Echarts for the last 4 years on a near daily basis and I've yet to find a visualization I couldn't do with it. [1] https://github.com/apache/echarts https://github.com/apache/echarts + https://github.com/hustcc/echarts-for-react https://github.com/hustcc/echarts-for-react Some examples here: https://echarts.apache.org/examples https://echarts.apache.org/examples