Encodable: Configurable Grammar for Visualization Components
This work addresses the challenge for visualization developers by providing a tool to unify component APIs, though it is incremental as it builds on existing visualization grammar concepts.
The authors tackled the problem of inconsistent APIs across visualization component libraries by introducing Encodable, a configurable grammar that helps component authors define and parse encoding specifications, resulting in a standardized approach for building components.
There are so many libraries of visualization components nowadays with their APIs often different from one another. Could these components be more similar, both in terms of the APIs and common functionalities? For someone who is developing a new visualization component, how should the API look like? This work drew inspiration from visualization grammar, decoupled the grammar from its rendering engine and adapted it into a configurable grammar for individual components called Encodable. Encodable helps component authors define grammar for their components, and parse encoding specifications from users into utility functions for the implementation. This paper explains the grammar design and demonstrates how to build components with it.