Building Responsive Data Visualization for the Web

Chapter 07 Responsive Data Visualization Tenets

As you push toward building more complex, data-driven applications on the web, it’s important to understand the many parallels between responsive data visualization and responsive design as a whole. In this chapter, we’ll revisit some of the core tenets established throughout the book so far, adding clarity and specificity to how they relate to data visualization. You’ll also learn some new principles for guiding how you build visualizations for the web.

Designing Content-First

It wasn’t too long ago that creating a chart on the web was essentially impossible. In Not So Distant History, the horribly resistant path of least resistance was to use the .NET Framework to render a chart on the server, and return a static image via an interpreter layer.

You read that right: a static image.

The only way to have interactive charts in Not So Distant History was to force users to leave the browser and open Excel. Users were stuck looking at a JPEG of a chart, and it was virtually impossible to draw any meaning out of the data other than by actually looking at it without interacting with it, because the visualizations were simply images—there was no semantic markup embedded within them.

While images were a simple way of visualizing data, developers also turned to Java Applets and Flash. These were plugins that could render beautiful complex information loaded from external sources. Just as with web design as a whole, Flash seemed to dominate ...