As much as I appreciate this (sakes me the time of doing mind-bending D3, etc.), I would very much rather have an off-screen renderer that could generate SVGs server-side.
Somehow we’ve almost completely lost the art of offscreen rendering, which is so much more useful for things like mail, documents, etc.
That's something that bugs me too. D3 is pretty amazing but is only accessible to coders.
> we’ve almost completely lost the art of offscreen rendering
markdown2.com is something I'm working on to address that.
It lets you design markdown documents containing charts & diagrams, and then Save As HTML/PDF or SVG/JPG.
There's also an API for generating them in bulk.
There are plenty of options to render SVG serverside, no idea why you think “we’ve almost completely lost the art”. For instance, with Apache Echarts: https://apache.github.io/echarts-handbook/en/how-to/cross-pl... Plus you can always use browser automation like playwright, though that’s more resource heavy.
Ideally in the future Ripl could support features like server-rendered SVGs and Offscreen Canvas. I already have a plan on how to go about tackling these two, I just sadly don't have the time...
Somehow we’ve almost completely lost the art of offscreen rendering, which is so much more useful for things like mail, documents, etc.