JSON Canvas Spec
36 points
by tobr
3 days ago
| 4 comments
| jsoncanvas.org
| HN
bryanrasmussen
1 hour ago
[-]
It would be useful to have examples of data and the representation this would result in.

Although you can go to https://jsoncanvas.org/ itself and see an example rendering, you cannot see the exact data that created it - I think, although you can sort of guess since the element names are stuff like node.

I sort of doubt this is the best data structure for representing this kind of thing. Maybe I'm wrong though but I would think I would go for something like https://github.com/jsongraph/json-graph-specification which strikes me as closer to graphml which I have some experience with, and maybe give it ability to embed videos etc. (which for all I know someone already has)

This is all an initial feeling though, like hmm, no I think it's wrong, and maybe I am just not seeing why this would be better than another solution.

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kepano
55 minutes ago
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You can see the data it created. Just click "Toggle output" in the bottom right corner.
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bryanrasmussen
17 minutes ago
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ah ok, sorry about that. I didn't really look at that part of the UI much, noticed it had some zoom stuff, noticed I couldn't zoom normally and scroll to where I wanted to read, was somewhat miffed.
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Garlef
9 minutes ago
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I'm not sure about this:

An "infinite" canvas without some notion of recursion such as viewports feels incomplete.

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makeitrain
1 hour ago
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Looks cool. I recently hit some limits with mermaid and this seems a little more flexible.
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MoonWalk
52 minutes ago
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Are pixels really the best way to encode position at this point?
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Garlef
21 minutes ago
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Agreed.

The upside is that it does not leave the most important aspect open to interpretation.

But it prevents this from being text-only at the point of creation:

You'll most likely need some programmatic environment to create non-trivial diagrams.

But then the question is: Why not just an SVG instead?

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