Quick Thoughts On Charts.css

Most digital products we use include charts. Fitness trackers use charts to tell us how far we stepped and how long we slept. Marketing automation products use charts to tell us how many people did the thing you wanted them to do. Charts are everywhere.

As common as they are charts haven't always been the simplest components to implement in products. They rely on well structured data and - depending on what your users might need - building "real time" charts to interrogate on the fly is even more complex.

The more data there is, the more it's transformed and visualised, the slower your app might be.

One of my current favourite solutions is QuickChart - an open source product which generates image charts and PDFs on the fly. It's lightweight, easy to host, and fast. Yet, it lacks a few elements some developers might need - like interactivity.

Because QuickChart generates images, they're static by nature. Hovering over trend lines won't do anything.

This is where Charts.css comes in. Not only is it super fast - it's powered by CSS after all - it's interactive. It includes motion effects, animations, and tooltips. Pretty neat.

And, because the output is easily parseable and understandable by web browsers and search engines, it should play nice with your SEO efforts, too.

Give it a try. And follow its creator Rami Yushuvaev on Twitter.