Periodic table of the web's APIs

Nice. Some suggestions: 1) Show some expanded information on hover; 2) Put (more) links to Wikipedia/CanIUse; 3) Allow some kind of resize. Even if I zoom out in Chrome I cannot see all the periodic table at once; 4) Maybe the rows must be organized by "relevant" ratio. So currently used will be on top and obsolete/deprecated in bottom; 5) Yet on 4, maybe we can customize the order? 6) Missing a "Server side" column for ASP.Net, Php, etc... 7) Allow hide/show columns

This is very useful, thank you. I had to zoom out to get an overview and the legend overlapped with the top left of the table. If it could scale to different sizes more clearly and smoothly that would be an improvement I think. But I understand if you don't intend to make changes, and it's also great as it is, thanks very much for releasing!

The colour coding doesn't really have good-enough contrast.

I can't personally distinguish the three first colours. I can tell they're somehow different, but can't tell which is which. All three are some kinda of "olive-like greenish".

Maybe try going with better contrasting colours?

Here's a useful tool to better test this: https://contrast-ratio.com/#darkolivegreen-on-olive

It's funny, I've always read a lot about these accessibility issues, but this is the first time I find myself affected by one to the point where I can't interpret something.

I think this is a worthwhile exercise but the years make no sense at all. CSS was proposed in 1994, not 2015. It's off by literally 2 decades. Also XHTML was released in 2000... By 2010 it was almost obsolete with HTML5 coming out 4 years later

I stopped reading there

It would be also great to have at least one link for all API, so that I can easily learn more about a particular API.

I considered, especially since this is a Show HN, to not say anything and let it slide, but considering the potential long tail for negative effects, where web dev circles are already filled with mildly annoying falsehoods and crazy beliefs, it seems kind of irresponsible to opt for letting it slide out of some (possibly mistaken) notion of politeness.

There are some bad conclusions that can be drawn from this chart, if not just downright bad info contained in it, at least in its current form.

For example, if the date labels are going to be this arbitrary, it would probably be better to just omit them altogether.

One of the interesting side effects of the periodic table was that it made people go look for elements to fill in the gaps.

There was a similar 2D layout that prompted the search for a memristor.

Perhaps in the same way a tech table grouped by some properties on axis will prompt developers to ‘fill in the gaps’ and make new tech?

That reminds me of the time someone online pointed out that customers did in fact believe "essential oils" to mean "these are essential = required for survival", not "these constitute essences = extracts of a plant's ingredients".

It's kind of like "REST" in "REST interface". You know it just means like... normal and good.

I think people are used to terms being used when they don’t really mean anything.

I don't think the people that create "periodic tables" for other areas understand the principles behind the actual periodic table of elements. I've never seen any example that had any kind of underlying principle like the real thing.

Well, it's worth delving a bit into the history of the periodic table of the elements to understand how it came to be.

Lavoisier is usually credited with the first systematic list of the elements, partially because he's generally credited as being the father of modern chemistry and is associated with the transition from alchemy to chemistry. His list, published in 1789, does have some errors: he included "light" and "caloric" (aka heat), and several metals are given in oxide form instead of pure form (e.g., magnesium, calcium, molybdenum, barium). There's no inherent order to the list.

As stoichiometry develops over the next few decades, chemists begin to discover the atomic weights of elements, and further establish relative ratios of elements in compounds, so we can identify that (say) magnesium oxide has magnesium and oxygen in a one-to-one ratio, whereas sodium oxide has a two-to-one ratio.

Parallel to this effort, it also becomes readily apparent that there are some groups of elements that behave very similarly--today, we'd call these the alkali metals (first column), alkaline earth (second column), chalcogens (third column from right; least used of the list), and the halogens (second column from right).

By the 1860s, these patterns and the atomic masses are starting to be combined into two-dimensional tables, taking a list of elements with increasing masses and chopping it off every so often to make a new row. Mendeleev wasn't the first to create this kind of table, but he was the first to recognize that some of the data was wrong [1], and most importantly, he discovered several periodic trends in the process that allowed him to predict the properties of unknown elements, with gallium and germanium the most ringing successes.

The periodic table we get in the 19th century does not look like our modern periodic table, though. It creates 8 groups of elements, with group VIII comprising three elements in a row (the columns headed by iron, cobalt, and nickel in the modern table). When noble gasses were discovered, they were combined into a Group 0. Not every row would have a group 0 and group VIII entry. Pretty much all of the tables from this era will list groups with their oxide/hydride valencies, which should give you an idea of how the groups are organized.

It's not until the early 20th century that chemists began to develop the theory of atomic numbers, and shortly thereafter electron configuration. This leads to the development of the periodic table dominated by increasing atomic number instead of increasing atomic weight, and also begins to recognize that the table isn't a simple table but has a more stair-step design, comprising what we would now call the s block (left two columns), p block (right 6 columns), d block (middle mass), and f block (the lanthanide and actinide series).

This development helps settle the issues with rare earth elements--the lanthanides don't make sense in view the old periodic table layout (there's too many of them!), although it also doesn't help that separating the lanthanides from one another is so difficult that several elements were later shown to be mixtures of different lanthanides. It really doesn't help organizing known elements into a table when your input data is wrong!

That said, if you pay careful attention to modern periodic tables, you will notice that there is one place where tables differ. Which elements are placed below yttrium? Is lanthanum and actinium in the main table? Or is lutetium and lawrencium in the main table? Or do you create a gap below yttrium and place both lanthanum and lutetium in the supplemental series at the bottom? Organizing the lanthanides is still an unsolved problem for chemists!

[1] At the time, the way of calculating atomic mass meant you had to make a guess at valency to compute the atomic mass. If the valency was wrong, then the atomic mass would be wildly off.

I was expecting a pattern, but there wasn't one; one of the two classic problems in computer science, I guess.

Mind blown. I never thought of that.

Indeed. Having to sidescroll at any size/zoom is really, really annoying.

The two blues are identical: the CSS has them both colored as "dodgerblue."

Facebook appears to be the only one in the "Proprietary" category. The rest of the blue ones are all "Chrome."

Hi! The Geolocation API seems to be missing. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation...

It's a bug in the CSS when the width is too small– increase your window width to fix it– feel free to submit a pull request.

Yes, they should be unique so the abbreviations can be used in communication. Thanks for the catch, I fixed it now.