On 7 Dec 2015, at 02:52, Karsten Loesing <karsten@torproject.org> wrote:

Signed PGP part
Hi everyone,

I posted some thoughts on Scaling Tor Metrics [0] almost two weeks ago
and received very useful feedback from George, David, Thomas, and
Letty. Thanks for that! ...

...

So, one task would be: #1 decide whether we can still ignore
JavaScript and what it has to offer. I agree that D3.js is cool, I
even used it myself in the past, though I know very little about it.
This decision would mean that we develop new visualizations in D3.js
and phase out the existing R/ggplot2 visualizations one by one. This
is a tough decision, but one with a lot of potential. I understand
how we're excited about this as developers, but I'd want to ask
Metrics users about this first.

I run Tor Browser in high security mode by default. That disables JavaScript on all sites.

I like being able to browse metrics without turning JavaScript on (except for the bubble graphs[0]).

But we already require users to turn on JavaScript for the bubble graphs, globe, etc.

So it's not an unreasonable decision to require it.

...
One important and still somewhat low-hanging fruit is: #10 give
external developers more support when developing visualizations that
could later be added to Metrics. This requires better documentation,
but it also requires making it easier to install Tor Metrics locally
and test new additions before submitting them. The latter is a good
goal, but we're not there yet. The documentation part doesn't seem
crazy though. David, if you don't mind being the guinea pig yet once
more, I'd want to try this out with your latest visualizations. This
is pending on the JavaScript decision though.