An SVG is all you need

Two years ago I re-vamped my "Spurious Correlations" side project, which is mostly just a bunch of charts. However, I couldn't find a charting software I liked that would display clean, simple visuals with the constraints I wanted. (I had used pCharts and HighCharts in the past, but didn't like charting in Javascript or PHP.)

I decided to "roll my own" and write Python scripts that outputted SVG markup. I was worried this would go about as well as every other "roll your own" project does, but was pleasantly surprised. It is surprisingly easy to output reliable, good-looking SVG graphics using Python. If you are making a chart, everything is just math.

The infinite scalability is almost just a happy upside to the simplicity of creating the visualizations, which is annoying in raster format. It made me like SVG even more.

It's a bit sad that Postscript never caught on as much as it could have. In an alternate timeline, it could have been the HTML (and SVG) we got in ours.

Postscript is still everywhere. Its just out of sight, being used as a compile target.

PDF may have "officially" replaced it, but it is still embedded almost everywhere you look.

PDF is a sad replacement for PS. As far as I can tell, it was an attempt to obscure PS, because alternative vendors were getting better as Postscript than the originators.

(There was some justification in terms of 'Oh, a binary format like PDF is more space efficient.' But PDF never really was more efficient than compressed PS.)

It's not that PS has vanished, but PS isn't nearly as 'everywhere' as HTML came to be.