IE8 Charting Next steps

mike thompson mithomps at redhat.com
Wed Sep 26 14:30:33 UTC 2012


Soliciting input for next steps:


I spent yesterday messing with various combinations of excanvas.js with aight.js and sizzle.js (also packaged in jQuery). This was precipitated by the discovery that GFlot (the gwt packaging of flot.js) renders canvas elements in IE8 via excanvas. So, knowing that some form of  canvas elements can be rendered in IE8 via a polyfill (excanvas), I tried to add the extra functionality that was needed in addition to excanvas (that I tested alone before) for the d3.js charts to be rendered. This was NOT successful. I have not seen anything in the forums saying there has been success with d3 on IE8. And my three cross postings of this questions in the forums (Quora, StackOverflow, d3 google groups) has gone unanswered.

The most probable solutions I see for next steps are (in order of worst to best for IE8 users):

	A) The current situation is that I have charting turned off for IE8 users in the Monitor Tab.	I'm assuming that this means we would leave the dashboard GFlot charts in for IE8 -- unless we want to turn those off as well
	B) Pursue server-side solution via Batik. This would give us a single codebase, however, it is not proven yet (still a couple days work) and IE8 users would get a static bitmapped rendering of the charts.
	C) Use d3.js but use html bar charts (via divs) for IE8. The IE8 experience would be marginally worse but the codebase would be fairly similiar as both chart types would use d3.js technology but just different graph library solutions (html vs canvas/svg).
	D) Leave the current GFlot charts in place and render them for IE8 giving IE8 users usable interactive charts. This would come at the price of two sets of charting codebase. We would also need to replace the iframe (portal.war) charts in monitor tab to GFlot as well to be free of portal.war.


The solutions choice varies depending on where the priorities lie -- with  IE8 users experience versus  a cleaner codebase.
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