On: The Trouble with D3

[jacobolus]

> D3 round trips through text, making it hard to achieve fast custom animations.

Isn’t this just an inherent problem with using SVG (or DOM in general)?

Conceivably you could use D3 to drive some other drawing method, though you might not get that much out of it at that point, unless you were trying to draw maps or something.

[ridiculous_fish → jacobolus]

I think the answer is no; for example one can use document.createElement(). I found that D3 was doing the equivalent of setting innerHTML.

[jacobolus → ridiculous_fish]

Not sure about current browsers, but a few years ago setting innerHTML was significantly faster than the other DOM APIs.

But in any event SVG path strings (and other element attributes) are inherently strings, there’s nothing you can do to get around that.