Book Image

Learning Responsive Data Visualization

By : Hanchett, Körner
Book Image

Learning Responsive Data Visualization

By: Hanchett, Körner

Overview of this book

Using D3.js and Responsive Design principles, you will not just be able to implement visualizations that look and feel awesome across all devices and screen resolutions, but you will also boost your productivity and reduce development time by making use of Bootstrap—the most popular framework for developing responsive web applications. This book teaches the basics of scalable vector graphics (SVG), D3.js, and Bootstrap while focusing on Responsive Design as well as mobile-first visualizations; the reader will start by discovering Bootstrap and how it can be used for creating responsive applications, and then implement a basic bar chart in D3.js. You will learn about loading, parsing, and filtering data in JavaScript and then dive into creating a responsive visualization by using Media Queries, responsive interactions for Mobile and Desktop devices, and transitions to bring the visualization to life. In the following chapters, we build a fully responsive interactive map to display geographic data using GeoJSON and set up integration testing with Protractor to test the application across real devices using a mobile API gateway such as AWS Device Farm. You will finish the journey by discovering the caveats of mobile-first applications and learn how to master cross-browser complications.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
10
Index

Units and lengths in the browser


Creating a Responsive Design, website, or graphics strongly depends on the units and lengths that a browser can interpret. We can easily create an element that fills the whole width of a container using the percentage values that are relative to the parent container, whereas achieving the same result with absolute values can be very tricky. Thus, mastering responsive graphics also means knowing all the absolute and relative units that are available in the browser.

Units for absolute lengths

The most convenient and popular way in web designing and development is to define and measure lengths and dimensions in absolute units, usually in pixels. The reason for this is that designers and developers often want to specify the exact dimensions of an object. The pixel unit called px has been introduced as a visual unit based on a physical measurement to read from a device in the distance of approximately one arm's length; however, all modern browsers can also allow...