
Dear HN: I wrote an SVG charting library. What do you think? - kilian
http://kilianvalkhof.com/2010/design/grafico-javascript-charting-library/
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ZeroGravitas
I'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.

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al_james
What's wrong with pie charts? For certain datasets and views they are perfect.
What's more, people understand them.

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kilian
People 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_intel...](http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/save_the_pies_for_dessert.pdf)

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.

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al_james
Ummm... 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.

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adamt
It 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.

~~~
kilian
This works in IE, it uses Raphael ( <http://www.raphaeljs.com> ) so IE gets
VML :) IE is noticeably slower though.

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ig1
My 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
<http://www.jqplot.com/> makes use of canvas and every browser that support
canvas has a function to export them to bmp.

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qjz
Very 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.

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scorchin
That 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!

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wensing
Your 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).

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kilian
check 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.

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davidw
The 'available graph types' need to be linked to examples.

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kilian
Good idea, just did so :)

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revorad
Hey 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.

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kilian
The 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.

~~~
revorad
Yes, it did load finally. That's great, so are you generating VML or using
excanvas?

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kilian
It's built on Raphael ( <http://www.raphaeljs.com> ) so VML :)

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ntulip
very nice.

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fmeyer
Great job killian, I was looking for something exactly like this. =)

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cmelbye
Very nice! This will be perfect to use in my project. Thanks!

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danskil
I like it. though wish it was one written for Jquery

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wisty
Nice documentation, and nice looking graphs.

