Protovis - Visualization toolkit for JavaScript using SVG. | Hacker News Reader

Protovis - Visualization toolkit for JavaScript using SVG.

vis.stanford.edu

30 pointsbarredo10 comments

Once again, here is my standard comment every time somebody puts out a Canvas app:

  Please add the ONE line of code required for this to run in IE

Look, Internet Explorer had VML support way back in IE5, and it's trivial to emulate Canvas with it. Google even supplies a library that you can include:

http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/

Put that in. Today.

This isn't Canvas. It's SVG.

... which would explain why it doesn't work in Chrome either.

It's surprising that they would put this out into the world as though it were finished, seeing as it runs on such a small slice of the world's browsers.

Seems like there's nothing there that couldn't work in Canvas (and thus be usable in every major browser). I wonder why they chose such a dead-end tech to do it in.

Do you know any other good visualization toolkits in javascript?

Processing.js is a port of Processing to javascript and uses the canvas element.

http://processingjs.org/

SVG is one of the most interesting web technologies right now, even better than canvas. But there are strong forces opposing it like M$ and adobe that will never allow it to gain traction. All major browsers support SVG except IE. And they will never implement it.

I would like to know their reasons.

The reasons are Silverlight, Flash and AIR. As for getting SVG in Internet Explorer, apparently Google is working on something like the ExCanvas project for SVG, otherwise there are libraries like RaphaelJS which abstract away the differences between SVG and VML.

I can't help but feel that SVG is yet another misapplication of XML; that if we hadn't drunk so much XML koolaid around the turn of the millenium, we'd have been able to come up with a less verbose format.

did you look at the sublanguage for paths? It's quite compact if you want compact - the other primitives (like circle, ellipse etc.) are more verbose but IMHO sometimes better if you want the SVG file to be read by humans.

Besides, XML gives you full DOM-access - that's the thing where I see the true difference as compared to Canvas. The programming model is much more like "usual" client-side Javascript programming - append elements to parents, react to events that happen on elements etc., whereas Canvas has a fairly imperative programming model.

So, to cut a long story short - if you are offended by the XML and verbosity give it another chance and look "through" the XML to discover the declarative nature of SVG and the corresponding programming model...

I dunno, I've done a lot of work with SVG, and I find the verbosity to be quite useful. It really depends on how you decide to use it - for me, its an excellent container format once you have coded a little controller-view abstraction.

For example for a music-editing software project (internal, not publically released) I once used SVG as the primary User interface description language, with nodes named according to the verbs and objects in the UI paradigm, with the DOM structure being modified from a C++ application as needed depending on realtime input from the user.

It works fabulously for this .. All I had to do was provide a dictionary of key node names to a UI designer, tell them "whatever you call a 'dial' has to have a 'needle', and then it will work for all controls that are using your dial skin", and hey-presto: instant UI appeal! Without any major coding changes it was possible to have very fresh, very appealing user interfaces built up by artists overnight .. and another thing I found interesting was that those artists I worked with that understood that the Node Editor was the primary interface to my program, were able to get really nice stuff done, fast, and with enthusiasm.. whereas those who complained that SVG wasn't Illustrator and that they were /never/ going to learn Inkscape to build the GUI and that I had to learn to use 'the real tools .. like Illustrator' .. well, that was just a waste of time.

So my personal experience with SVG has been superb .. I really think its an excellent data form for design user interfaces and, given the appropriate strategy for how to lay out SVG nodes in a manner that makes sense (hint: group), it can be very fun for artistic/creative hats to participate directly in the skinning of an application ..

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