doing a scatter plot of 10k points in SVG is impractical - ok, so you could argue that you can't really see 10k points on the screen, that's fair, but if a user has 10k points, and they want to see them, you either have to figure out how to represent that with fewer points (collapsing a bunch of points into larger marks perhaps) or doing density estimation, or something else. To do it the naive way, SVG is impractical
But isn't collapsing points into larger marks or density estimation and so on stuff that d3 (or it's predecessor protovis) is made for? I thought, yes if you want to just draw 10k points obviously canvas will win, if you want to do (interactive) graphs and plots svg wins.
