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Comment by jashkenas | Hacker News Reader

For the curious, this started out as a D3/SVG chart that we ended up porting over to be 90% canvas, just for performance reasons (especially in Firefox). There's still lots of nice ugly "if (USE_CANVAS) {" stuff in there.

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It's excellent work. Good idea and execution - in particular, I like how you shift from an absolute scale to a logarithmic scale. I think the animation should help people who don't normally have an intuition for logarithmic scales.

The most fun I'm having is watching "0" fly off to infinity when you switch from page 1 to page 4 or 5.

I guess negative infinity is pretty close to positive infinity in that toolkit.

Awesome chart. NYTimes always does such a great job with charts and graphical data representation. Many would do well to learn from NYT, instead of chartjunk with clipart and few data points.

I was going to come in here and ask just that question. Now a followup--what was wrong with d3? was it just too slow to render? Or too slow to load?

I imagine it's the performance hit of moving around so many DOM elements on the page. We had a similar experience with this visualization that started as D3 http://trends.truliablog.com/vis/greener/

When the bubbles were done as SVG elements, the animation in Firefox became _painfully_ slow. Felt like just a couple frames per second, maybe. (In contrast, the animation was fine in WebKit-based browsers).

Is the original available? I'd like to look into this. Thanks!

Are those real or nominal dollars?

It's in 2011 inflation adjusted nominal dollars.

Er, 'inflation-adjusted' and 'nominal' are opposites, so that answer leaves me confused.

Looking at one of the prominent early data points, AAPL:

Some online sources peg its IPO valuation at about $1.3B at the time (ie, nominal 1980 dollars), rising to about $1.7B in the first day pop. According to WolframAlpha, [$1.3 billion 1980 dollars in 2011 dollars] is about $3.5B adjusted by the CPI - close to the NYTimes $3.4B chart number.

From that I conclude that the numbers have been adjusted to "2011 (real) dollars".

Sorry, brain fart. Yes, it's adjusted to 2011 (real) dollars.

It's just crazy how slow Firefox gets at the simplest samples from the D3 site.

Just try the "Evolution of Wealth & Health of Nations" in Chrome AND Firefox http://bost.ocks.org/mike/nations/

Is there any open source version of your port?

I'm evaluating D3 and other libs for charting. If you could provide more details on specific things that were slow, resource heavy or buggy, that would be very useful.

Fantastic job. I've seen quite a few impressive interactive charts over at the nytimes in the past year or so.

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