

SVG: The best way to graph quantitative data - rohanjon
http://developers.simplegeo.com/blog/2011/01/05/svg-the-best-way-to-graph-quantitative-data/

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pygy_
RaphaelJS offers the advantages of SVG with an IE fallback. It's a Javascript
library that outputs VML in IE6+ and SVG everywhere else.

The graphs can be manipulated in JS after their creation to create animations.

<http://raphaeljs.com/>

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jacobolus
Also has the disadvantage of adding a lot of unnecessary overhead to SVG,
changing how you interact with it, and preventing you from using lots of SVG
features. For anything that needs much redrawing or interaction, the IE
fallback can be extremely slow.

If you have reasonably simple needs or can adapt an existing Raphael demo, go
for it. For my own projects, I don’t think it’s worth it, but YMMV.

Protovis is a much more exciting SVG framework.

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Xurinos
I favor Protovis (quick) and jquery.svg (custom).

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magicseth
Ironically, Adobe used to be the biggest supporter of SVG... before they
purchased Flash. Their svg renderer was by far the best in the field at the
time, and supported lots of wonderful features, including great ECMAscript
(Javascript), had the ability to build AJAX-like interactions using remote
requests, and was fundamentally awesome.

It never made it out of beta and got killed when Flash became Adobe's new
sweetheart. Very sad.

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eitland
I once made a GPS navigation system using IE 6 (!) in fullscreen, the Adobe
flash plugin (for SVG and ECMAScript), SVG files on local disk and a small
program that got the GPS coordinates from the receiver and added them to a
file in the same directory. This was a few years ago before mobile internet
became cheap enough for mainstream use.

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hc5
It's worth noting that Android browsers don't support SVG (yet).

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msy
To make that even more..fun the support is there but disabled and the dev team
have refused to give any kind of timeline. I assume there's either some
significant performance issues or glaring bugs. This seems odd given it's part
of webkit & runs just dandy on iOS.

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fletchowns
If you are interested in SVG charting engines, check out Highcharts. Used them
on a project recently and really liked how it turned out. It's a shame that
VML performance in IE is so terrible when SVG performance in Chrome is so
awesome.

<http://www.highcharts.com/>

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megaman821
Highcharts is definitely one of the most impressive chart solutions I have
seen.

I don't remember its VML performance being particularly slow but I do know
its' SVG performance screams in IE9.

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3pt14159
Naw, SVG is a good way some of the time. It's _very_ context specific.

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chrisbroadfoot
Cool. But where's the live demo?

Also - just one snarky comment on JS style:

    
    
      if(!!document.createElementNS 
       && !!document.createElementNS('http://www.w3.org/2000/svg, "svg").createSVGRect) {
    

No need for the bangs!

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benatkin
d3 is really interesting from a coding standpoint. It's a bit like a fancy orm
like SQLAlchemy, Sequel, or the new ActiveRecord with arel. Instead of
transforming model data it transforms view data, though. It's worth a look
IMHO.

<https://github.com/mbostock/d3>

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redwood
Hadn't heard of simplegeo: look cool...one of the only startups wthout a jobs
page: p

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infocaptor
SVG is slower than html5 canvas. my preference would be still html5 due to
performance reasons. It is good to use a combination of both. For SVG files
can be converted to javascript code and vice versa

