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Comment by adeaver | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting. I have yet to have any issues with D3 working in IE8 and above. Don't really care about anything below that but so long as it support SVG I would imagine it works.

And I've also found HighCharts extremely limiting. I ended up having to break things in HighCharts to meet some requirements. Granted that's a project problem not a HC problem, but D3 made much more sense for me.

To each their own :)

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Let me be clear...for my own personal projects and works, D3 is the way to go. It makes the most sense for the crazy ideas I have, and from my limited perspective, just seems to be the best API among all viz libraries.

But in the domain of common chart type that areperfectly serviceable, clear, and customizable...there's not much choice. Google Charts seems like an easy win because hey, it's Google. It'll definitely be around for at least a few years, as it seems to be the dogfood tool for Fusion tables and other Google products.

But other than that, there's not much else that seems to be widely adopted. Raphael is more of a visualization library and seems to be going by the wayside after D3. Highcharts, in this context, seems to be an all-out winner compared to Google Charts, and against most of the D3-chart-wrappers that I've seen so far (Rickshaw, nvd3, etc).

Have you looked at bokeh? http://bokeh.pydata.org/plot_gallery/burtin_example.html

Note: I'm a core dev on bokeh.

I've heard of it but thought it was for the domain of python development...which is not a downside, per se, but doesn't always fit the project requirements of "here's some data, now throw some javascript on a page and show that data"

Highcharts is ideal if you don't have anything fancy going on anywhere close to your charts. The moment you do, it starts to go to pieces.

Also, the source code feels like an Escher painting. :( That was actually the first time I started wondering if I should find an IDE for Javascript.

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