1. Ah, but how to define an “edit”? The git repo for the talk had 69 commits, but they varied greatly in size. There’s also the history of the individual examples (which could be crawled from GitHub Gist), the history of the write-up (which I squashed on merge, sorry!), as well as various notes scattered while I was still figuring out the topic.
2. I hope it archives well — there are no dependencies on other sites, though it loads resources via JavaScript. The site is backed by a repo on GitHub. (Though I should point out that I retain copyright on my personal website, despite the source being viewable.)
We have a similar concern with published graphics on The New York Times. It’s funny and sad now how so many animations on University course websites are practically unviewable because of waning support for Java; I expect it will be similarly awkward to run Flash plugins in ten years. On the other hand, content written to web standards seems to have a longer shelf-life, as the standards are widely supported by many organizations, not just one. So my hope is that standards-based graphics will both archive well and continue to run on evolving browsers.
3. Yes, it’s already the case that graphics (and further interactive graphics) are increasingly integrated with prose, rather than being relegated exclusively to standalone content. That’s not to say standalone graphics are bad — there are many viable forms for graphics, and sometimes you want it to be standalone — but that we’re figuring out ways to integrate “multimedia” more elegantly and less gimmick-ly.
I still think the hard part is expressing the ideas & communicating effectively rather than the technology. Designing interaction is hard because there are so many ways to do it, and you don’t always know what will be intuitive to readers.
2. I hope it archives well — there are no dependencies on other sites, though it loads resources via JavaScript. The site is backed by a repo on GitHub. (Though I should point out that I retain copyright on my personal website, despite the source being viewable.)
https://github.com/mbostock/bost.ocks.org/tree/gh-pages/mike...
We have a similar concern with published graphics on The New York Times. It’s funny and sad now how so many animations on University course websites are practically unviewable because of waning support for Java; I expect it will be similarly awkward to run Flash plugins in ten years. On the other hand, content written to web standards seems to have a longer shelf-life, as the standards are widely supported by many organizations, not just one. So my hope is that standards-based graphics will both archive well and continue to run on evolving browsers.
3. Yes, it’s already the case that graphics (and further interactive graphics) are increasingly integrated with prose, rather than being relegated exclusively to standalone content. That’s not to say standalone graphics are bad — there are many viable forms for graphics, and sometimes you want it to be standalone — but that we’re figuring out ways to integrate “multimedia” more elegantly and less gimmick-ly.
I still think the hard part is expressing the ideas & communicating effectively rather than the technology. Designing interaction is hard because there are so many ways to do it, and you don’t always know what will be intuitive to readers.