---
title: Progressive Charts
categories:
- work
content-tags:
- technology
- code
- web
- aside
---

Back in 2001 Tantek Çelik dreamt up a little [polygonal CSS hack][1], using the bevels of borders to create angles in-browser.  Eventually, Lasse Reichstein Nielsen [ made the technique accessible][2].  Back then, I was [thinking about CSS][3] and wanted to try my hand at unobtrusive DHTML.

So I was inspired to implement simple rendering of HTML lists as area charts.  Naturally, once it mostly worked I lost interest, and let it rest assuming someone would have the same idea and take it much farther.

But as far as I can call, no one has.  Now Eric Meyer (who helped popularize the slant technique) brought it to mind again with his [CSS bar charts][4] (granted, without resorting to scripting).

So after letting the code age for 6 years, it's time to put it out there and hope it provides inspiration to others.  An [example][5] and [project][6] are on GitHub, all are welcome to join or fork.  I'd love to see it extended to handle tables, added to a library that turns unordered lists into bar charts, or at least made accessible as a plug-in to jQuery or other popular libraries.

   [1]: http://tantek.com/CSS/Examples/polygons.html
   [2]: http://www.infimum.dk/HTML/slantinfo.html
   [3]: https://hans.gerwitz.com/2003/05/11/of-standards-assholes-and-evolution.html
   [4]: http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2009/04/07/findings-of-the-a-list-apart-survey-2008/
   [5]: http://gerwitz.github.com/progressive-charts/
   [6]: http://github.com/gerwitz/progressive-charts/
