Why is D3 so Verbose?

Re:Why is D3 so Verbose? by moron4hire on Thursday August 21, 2025 @10:09AM (#44973015)

This is why I've always found it weird that people consider D3 to be a charting tool. Yes, people have used it to build a lot of charts, but it's really just a streaming data processing tool. It doesn't provide anything specific to charting[0]. All of that part, you're still left to figure out on your own.

[0] At least in the core, I'm not too familiar with the full ecosystem and what is considered official in terms of plugins. Everytime I've tried to use it, I've not found the documentation leading me to using anything more specifically oriented towards charting.

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Re:Why is D3 so Verbose? by joshcartme on Thursday August 21, 2025 @12:14PM (#44974538)

At least these days I think Plot, https://observablehq.com/plot/getting-started, which uses D3 under the hood and is from the makers of D3, is probably the closest thing to an official charting tool built on top of D3.

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Re:Why is D3 so Verbose? by digitalWestie on Thursday August 21, 2025 @10:36AM (#44973331)

This is the answer. People need to consider D3 more as a graphics/dom manipulation library than a charting library.

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Re:Why is D3 so Verbose? by gedy on Thursday August 21, 2025 @12:00PM (#44974378)

Yeah I used to pull my hair when a team would start down the D3 path for some non-interactive graphic, and then push back when I'd explain you can just use SVG for this simple case.

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Re:Why is D3 so Verbose? by TheHeasman on Thursday August 21, 2025 @11:22AM (#44973931)

Yaaasss. I think of it as being able to use a pencil to draw charts (and do creative stuff like Florence Nightingale's original polar area graph), instead of having a stencil that can draw things for you. It's a way to visually manipulate the DOM in a way if you're comfortable with data.

You can simply just use Tableau or Power BI and take screenshots otherwise.

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