Design and Implementation of Data Mining Tools [PDF] Data for journalists: understanding XML and RSS. If you are working with data chances are that sooner or later you will come across XML – or if you don’t, then, well, you should do.
Really. There are some very useful resources in XML format – and in RSS, which is based on XML – from ongoing feeds and static reference files to XML that is provided in response to a question that you ask. All of that is for future posts – this post attempts to explain how XML is relevant to journalism, and how it is made up. What is XML? For Protovis Users. D3 and Protovis have the same primary author (Mike Bostock), so it’s not surprising that these two systems take a similar approach to visualization.
However, there are plenty of important differences, too; enough that it made sense to start anew, rather than patching the design of Protovis. Many of these changes were influenced by observing users’ successes and struggles with past approaches. D3 and Protovis also share the same goal: to enable you, the web developer (however experienced you may be), to build custom visualizations in the browser with a minimum amount of effort.
Not “zero” effort, certainly—but at least to alleviate the repetive burden of common tasks, while retaining the expressiveness needed for custom designs.