Data Visualization with JavaScript

Chapter 2. Making Charts Interactive

In Chapter 1 we saw how to create a wide variety of simple, static charts. In many cases such charts are the ideal visualization, but they don’t take advantage of an important characteristic of the Web—interactivity. Sometimes you want to do more than just present data to your users; you want to give them a chance to explore the data, to focus on the elements they find particularly interesting, or to consider alternative scenarios. In those cases we can take advantage of the Web as a medium by adding interactivity to our visualizations.

Because they’re designed for the Web, virtually all of the libraries and toolkits we examine in this book include support for interactivity. That’s certainly true of the Flotr2 ...