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Comment by stared | Hacker News Reader

Please, don't use periodic table to visualize anything by elements. For elements it works great and is one of the most beautiful and useful visualization ever created (as it's form is related to fundamental relation between elements).

For everything else (unless having a similar structure to elements), it's awful, misleading and pointless. If I see such I am always wondering, is it: a tasteless designer, wannabe data scientist who know no other visualizations, or a science ignorant having no clue why Mendeleev's table is structured in that particular way, or a salesman wanting to give it extra legit and make it sound more fundamental.

Just please, don't.

Hint: just group things, in their own structure.

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I think you could do a periodic table of html elements, but the author hasn't done it here - at least not the "periodic" part.

For instance, I'd expect "head" and "body" to be in one period, and "thead" and "tbody" in the same groups of a different period. That could put "table" in the same group as "html", with them both being "container" periods. (with "iframe" being in the same group as "html"/"table"?) "fieldset" looks like it should fit in there somewhere also, possibly with "legend" being an equivalent to "title".

Then you'd have periods like "block elements" and "inline elements", with e.g. "blockquote" and "q" being in the same group for each. Ditto "div" and "span" - which I think should be in the same group ("overly generic elements"?), not in the same period as the author has them.

Similarly, "dl", "ul" and "ol" are 3 list periods, with "dd", "li" and ... "li" in the next group - where "li" being a repeated element is an interesting bit of information you could extract from such a table.

Note that I missed "dt" in the list elements periods above, but then there's a similarity between the "dl", "dt", "dd" period, and a possible "tr", "th", "td" period.

You are really making me want to do this. I liked the colored groups- that's actually useful information, disregarding its superficial similarity to the "real" periodic table of elements. It would be interesting to see a table that does a good job of grouping along other attributes like you've described here.

It pretty well falls along the lines of what I once wrote about- that HTML should be split into multiple, mutually exclusive sub-languages- with guarded sections of code that does not permit tags from any other groups to be interpreted as actual tags, as enforced by the browser. If browsers had this ability: to whitelist certain tags, imagine how many XSS attacks we could avoid, by having a special container in which script and style tags (and any other tags or attributes that cause the evaluation of code) strictly do not and cannot work.

OH well.

agreed. This is good, though: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...

(note that the word "periodic" is used correctly, and the structure of the table winds up not looking like the periodic table of the elements)

I think you may be taking it too seriously.

Are you saying that the OP's only value is humor?

It's just a way to visualize information. I find this interesting to look at and also well organized (personally love the color coding and the asymmetry).

In either case, no reason to be negative. If you don't like it, don't use it. If you are commenting to critique, no reason to be a jerk.

The periodic table isn't just a nice layout of information, the position of each element in the table provides further information about it. For example, we know gold (Au) is pretty a pretty good conductor of electricity. By looking at the other elements in its group (the column), we can guess that copper (Cu) and silver (Ag) are also good electrical conductors (in fact, some of the best).

Beyond that simple case, there are loads of other bits of information encoded in the position. The image on the Wikipedia article gives a good overview of some of the trends.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table#Periodic_trends

I'm well aware that the periodic table has a lot of various information encoded into it as I'm pretty sure anyone who's gone through high school is as well. I am not sure why you think the tags table is trying to fool anyone... it was chosen symbolically and it looks visually better than any other similar attempt I've seen before.

Not everything needs to be pigeonholed into the "must make perfect sense" category.

Forget making perfect sense, what sense does this layout make at all?

I expect columns to have similar properties. Why are <span> and <script> in the same column?

What property is increasing as I go left to right and top to bottom?

Why are some columns taller than others?

No, but you are diluting the value and understanding of the original.

Color code is nice here. I appreciate the gathered information.

But I am criticising visualizing using things such as periodic tables (were columns, rows and gaps have a particular meaning) for visualization for which they don't fit. Since it is not the first time I see such.

May point is not to use this particular visualization or not, but to make people thinking for a few seconds before starting visualizing: "Does the structure of this visualization fit the purpose? Or is it more like hammering nails with an iPhone?" (you can != you should).

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