I think the examples should have a JS native version in addition to the Observable implementation.
[1] https://datacrayon.com/shop/product/visualisation-with-d3/
D3 is a JS library for data visualisations.
Both are the brainchild of Mike Bostock. That's the connection. :)
I'm super grateful that they provide such good documentation, which is second to none, in a nicely explorable environment.
d3, on the other hand, has converted most of their examples to Observable, which requires extensive research to convert back to JS (in the best case) and in the worst case requires reverse engineering the runtime.
I'm not the only one with this opinion, there are plenty of others who have struggled through similar issues and discussed it.
"The process of converting an Observable notebook to standalone html and/or js is clearly not as simple and copying and pasting. The use of Observable notebooks for all D3 examples has made the introduction to the library much more challenging for this reason." [0]
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53155957/convert-d3-obse...
[1]: https://talk.observablehq.com/t/i-want-to-learn-d3-i-don-t-w...
Standard JS modules, very nice! D3 now works in all playgrounds and libraries even as dependencies without non-standard tooling!
https://jsbin.com/ducosajehi/edit?html,output
I do wish they didn't even publish UMD, that's a recipe for duplication if some libraries import the module and some import the UMD.
I am probably being unreasonable; but it's kind of nice to be able to have a single third-party dependency out of which you can pick what you need at the moment, rather than a host of small third-party dependencies. Kind of like lodash, from which you can at least import individual functions (import merge from 'lodash/merge') rather than installing all those functions as individual packages.
D3 is a low level visualisation library where you write code.
Excel/Tableau are business tools.
D3 is the best way to make visualizations online. Yes, it requires learning the library and building things from scratch, but it's light years better than the dog shit modules Tableau offers.
