Raphaël 2.0 is available | Hacker News Reader

Raphaël 2.0 is available

github.com

93 pointstilt21 comments

I think Raphaël is a nice idea: it’s great for people who want their stuff to be compatible with old versions of internet explorer, and it makes it very easy to build trivial things.

To be honest though, I found that in trying to build anything more complex or with much user interaction, just working directly with SVG APIs and building up my own abstractions as necessary was easier and much more flexible. People shouldn’t be afraid to learn SVG: it’s pretty easy!

For anything driven by data, I recommend looking at D3, which is designed around some very powerful ideas.

But SVG isn't supported in any version of IE... For me, that's the main reason to use Raphaël.

It’s supported in IE9+, and for earlier versions (if necessary) there’s SVG Web or Chrome Frame.

So your project just fails on IE7 and IE8?

Different projects obviously have different needs. I’m just pointing out that much of what I’ve heard people say about Raphaël is along the lines of “it’s nicer to use than raw SVG”, and providing a contrary data point.

Often, when trying to figure out what technology stack to use, developers look around at what seems to have chatter and hype. I think that in some cases they’d be better served by just learning the lower-level API, which isn’t too hard.

You didn't answer the question.

If he uses plain SVG, and IE7/8 doesn't support SVG, ________________.

Yeah, I like this library but SVG is still an issue on Android 2.3. Besides that it's great. I see video game companies using this to create Dashboards with stats for online gamers.

We started on a new project Friday and decided to go with Raphael. I'm amazed at what it can do - awesome stuff. Why on earth would you decide to write your own cross browser (vml + svg) library when it's already been done and the result is already very good?

Check out the presentation at JSConf EU about the new release: http://raphaeljs.com/jsconfeu/

Also see the mailing list post: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/raphaeljs/92YU952ohH...

That mailing list post seems to be from 7.5 months ago. Is there any list of the changes that actually made it into this release?

How does one get past slide 10?

The UI of this slide deck is highly frustrating.

Shift-click (via http://twitter.com/#!/DmitryBaranovsk/status/120131811857797...).

Thanks, now I'm stuck at slide 16. A simple changelog would be better...

Type in #17 at the end of the URL and hit refresh to step over the page. Shift click doesn't seem to work on that one.

click on pacman

It's not a changelog but the documentation has been updated.

http://raphaeljs.com/reference.html

Figured it out, shift click.

Is there anyway to view this on the iPad?

what puts me off raphael 1.0 is the lack of grouped transformations. you can collect elements into sets and perform operations on those, but that doesn't not give you a hierarchical transformation space.

i could be wrong but from a cursory glance it seems this is still the case with raphael 2.0.

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