Book Image

Learning Responsive Data Visualization

By : Erik Hanchett, Christoph Körner
Book Image

Learning Responsive Data Visualization

By: Erik Hanchett, Christoph 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 (16 chapters)
Learning Responsive Data Visualization
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Cross-browser Media Queries


When creating cross-browser responsive visualizations, you will most likely have to deal with the Media Query support, measurement, and unit issues. The last two can be easily detected and fixed using Modernizr (cssvhunit, cssvmaxunit, cssvminunit, cssvwunit, and more) and fallback solutions.

However, fixing the Media Query support once it is not available is quite tricky. Why is that? If detecting the availability of Media Queries is quite easy (using Modernizr), polyfilling it is a big hassle. The main reason is that Media Queries usually occur in your CSS styles and not in your JavaScript code. Until now, you only learned that JavaScript functions and APIs can be polyfilled using JavaScript. So, if we would want a polyfill for CSS (it has to be written in JavaScript), it always has to parse the complete CSS document to extend its functionality. This means instead of the native styling performance, we will have to parse the CSS using JavaScript, apply all known...