Voyeur Tools was using a powerful and flexible Flash-based charting library called Open Flash Chart. This library could draw data dynamically, handle hover and click events, and export images, among other features. Some of the scripting was a bit awkward, especially when crossing the web page and Flash membrane (and particularly with variable and function scope), but it was manageable. However, I recently started seeing some errors in certain circumstances, especially in Firefox and IE. These inconsistent errors are very difficult to debug and fix, because, well, they're inconsistent, and debugging between the browser and Flash is an exercise in blindness. I'd fixed previous problems with the use of the library, but I wanted to try to avoid the headache again if I could.
I considered various HTML5 charting libraries, and in particular the ones mentioned the ones mentioned here. We're already using the Javascript Infovis Toolkit, so that would have been my first choice, but there didn't seem to be a clear way to create a simple lineA line is the string of text limited by the width of a page. Lines are often used in tokenization, and may contain parts of one or more sentences. For example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." is a complete sentence and occurs on one line. By contrast, "Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor wood-cutter with his wife and his two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. He had little to bite and to break, and once when great dearth fell on the land, he could no longer procure even daily bread." spans three sentences and four lines. Return to Glossary. chart. After trying a few, I settled on Highcharts; I like the feature set, I like the appearance, and I like the mix of defaults (more concise) and flexibility in overriding defaults. Mostly, I'm just amazed and the embarassement of riches in the quality of the libraries available (how well they work and how well they're documented).
Since the library uses the Canvas tagA tag, also called an element, is characteristically used within HTML and XML to apply characteristics (such as headings, paragraphs or user-defined categories) or metadata to a document, usually a text. HTML and XML tags generally appear in matching pairs of an opening and a closing tag, with text in between. All text within a tag pair is modified by that tag, and one tag pair may be nested inside another. In the case of HTML, tags are used to format a text directly, or as a delimiter for CSS formatting to the text within that tag. An HTML paragraph tag: < p >< /p > In the case of XML, tags may be also be used as a delimiter for CSS formatting to the text within that tag, but its primary purpose is to apply metadata to that text. Ex: < book format="hardcover" >< /book > Both HTML and XML tags may be modified with attribute/value pairs. In the above example, format="hardcover" is the attribute/value pair modifying the tag < book >. Return to Glossary. from HTML5, there are some backwards compatibility issues with browsers, but it works in Firefox 2, Safari 3, Chrome and even back to IE6 (rendering is done through VML). Of course, this means it also work on an iPad – just what you needed to do text analysis, right?