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A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods - an XQuery, linked version

Back in 2007, Visual-Literacy.org  published a great Periodic Table of methods of visualisation. This displays around 100 diagram types arranged in the layout of the Periodic Table of Elements.

The web page uses a Javascript library to display an example of a diagram type when you mouse-over its box. A neat trick but perhaps not very accessible, so I took the liberty (with Ralph Lengler's subsequent approval) of scraping  this table to create a full listing of all the diagram types in alphabetical order.  The resultant application was used in teaching, allowing student to create their own classifications.  I see that application and my orginal blog post is still referenced on their site

Recently there has been a flurry of  tweets about the Periodical Table and coincidently I was moving the original application to a new server and changing to REST-style URLs as part of my work on URL-rewriting.

Here is the new version of that visualisation browser. There are only minor differences in the URL-rewiting approach to that used on the Maths site. Here the application is in a subdirectory of the kitwallace.co.uk virtual host, so a rewrite rule needed to be added to the Apache configuration of that domain and paths to CSS and Javascript files go one level further up.

The module code, particularly the dispatch function, is more readable than for the original query-string URLs. The main menu is also generated using the path 'signature'. The use of the path signatures makes it much clearer how pages are linked.  In this case I didn't parameterize the root directory.  I feel there has to be a better way to handle the problem of multiple versions.