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Comment by mbq | Hacker News Reader

There is a nice SVG drawing lib called Raphael.js (http://raphaeljs.com/); it does animations pretty well and works even in IE6 (via fallback to VML). So it basically does not work only on old Android and links.

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D3.js (http://d3js.org/) is another option to consider. Haven't used it much myself, but the examples show the wide array of possibilities.

Raphael is nice if your use case is fairly simple and along the lines of the examples provided on the homepage, but I would caution people that the lib is quite buggy and not (particularly?) actively maintained.

Do you have any alternatives you would recommend?

d3.js (http://d3js.org/) is pretty awesome and seems to be quickly becoming the standard

If Go is your thing, consider SVGo (http://github.com/ajstarks/svgo). For samples, see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ajstarks/sets/72157623441699483...

Well, it is obvious the if you don't need in-browser drawing you should just use static image files; but if you do, Raphael is way more versatile than canvas api or tricks with CSS. About bugs, I haven't seen any yet; what kind of them are you talking about?

My use case was a simple vector-drawing program. Many bugs related to inconsistent behavior across browsers, and things generally not working as documented (difficult to tell what is a documentation bug and what an implementation bug sometimes).

One that I actually had to fix (and submitted an as yet unacknowledged pull request for) was for arrow-ends: draw a path with an arrow head in blue, then draw one in red and watch every arrow-head on your page turn red.

Here are the 258 open issues in github:

    https://github.com/DmitryBaranovskiy/raphael/issues

I'm not trying to bad-mouth other peoples' work; just point out the current state of the project as I've experienced it, for the benefit of others.

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