About
D3’s atomic operand is the selection: a filtered set of elements queried from the current document.
Operators act on selections, modifying content.
Data joins bind input data to elements, enabling functional operators that depend on data, and producing enter and exit subselections for the creation and destruction of elements in correspondence with data.
While operators apply instantaneously by default, animated transitions interpolate attributes and styles smoothly over time.
Special operators called event handlers respond to user input and enable interaction.
Numerous helper modules, such as layouts and scales, simplify common visualization tasks.
D3 in context on three differentiating factors:
- implicit or explicit transformation, (D3’s transformations make dynamic visualizations easier to implement)
- deferred or immediate evaluation, (Immediate evaluation reduces internal control flow, moving it up to user code.)
- and access to a native representation.
D3 touches only the elements and attributes that need updating, rather than the entire scenegraph.