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Comment by baconner | Hacker News Reader

See also d3, a newer visualization framework from the same primary author. Similar to protovis but with a greater focus on updating and animation.

http://mbostock.github.com/d3/

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Thanks for the reference! But actually it doesn't appear to be a visualization framework, it's a transformation framework: "D3 does not provide a new graphical representation—unlike Processing, Raphaël, or Protovis, there is no new vocabulary of marks to learn. Instead, you build directly on standards such as CSS3, HTML5 and SVG."

For example, you could use this framework to build an HTML table or an SVG document directly.

That's literally true, but in practice D3 makes for (and is intended as) an effective Protovis replacement. The set of primitive marks in Protovis is close to that of SVG, in any case.

These libraries' primary author (Mike Bostok) views D3 as the successor to protovis:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/d3-js/UAEmdL4XArw/CfB4S-60u9...

In particular:

"I would recommend switching to D3. I have no current plans to release a new Protovis version."

I get the technical distinction, but the general purpose is still primarily to visualize no?

Thanks! But I can't find which browsers it supports, or which features it supports per browser.

It supports any browser in theory, as it just operates on the DOM. You may want to load Sizzle.js beforehand to give you more powerful CSS selectors for older versions of IE.

In reality you will want to use SVG to create anything impressive, so this means WebKit (Chrome, Safari), Firefox, Opera, IE9. And potentially IE6-8 if the SVGWeb Flash fallback supports all the SVG features you need.

Awesome, thanks for posting. I didn't know about this lib.

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