Performance Benefits of using CSS to create Custom Graphs for your Web Application
Introduction
Graphs have become an indispensable tool for understanding and analyzing data. In web applications, visualizing data can be a challenge due to the complexity of creating custom graphs. Thankfully, CSS can be used to make the process easier and more efficient. CSS can be used to create custom graphs with a wide range of interactive features, including highlighting, animation, and interactive elements. By using CSS to create custom graphs, web applications can benefit from improved performance and flexibility. Additionally, CSS can help reduce the amount of code needed to create custom graphs, making it easier to maintain and update them. In this blog post, we will explore the performance benefits of using CSS to create custom graphs for your web application.
Benefits of Using Custom Graphs in your Web Applications
Graphs are visual representations of data that can be used to better understand the underlying patterns and trends captured in your data. Graphs can be used to visualize a wide array of data and are commonly used in business applications to better understand trends in sales, profits, product usage, and more. Graphs help us to better understand and retain data. They provide a quick visual overview of what is happening in the data, and we can quickly identify patterns and outliers. Therefore, graphs are a powerful tool that can be used to improve the overall business analytics process. For example, we at ShortHills Tech have created a custom graph using CSS called BVR Quadrant which is a four-quadrant graph that plots ten products of a specific category on the basis of two market attributes price and popularity. The products are plotted in all four quadrants which represent the market position of the product present in that respective quadrant.
How to Create a Custom Graph using CSS?
HTML (the Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are two of the core technologies for building Web pages and their sub-elements. HTML provides the structure of the page and CSS provides the (visual and aural) layout. In a similar fashion, we can create a custom graph whose structure will be represented by HTML elements, and the layout and styling of the graph will be provided by CSS. This type of graph can be called a CSS graph.
For a detailed guide, you can refer to our blog post on?How to create a custom graph using HTML and CSS?in which we have explained how we created a custom graph for our web application by using only HTML and CSS.
The HTML and CSS code of the graph displayed above has been hosted on a CodePen whose link is provided below.
Performance Benefits of Using CSS to Create Custom Graphs for Web Applications
Loading Time
A consumer-facing web application must load at a lightning-fast speed because the loading speed affects the user experience and also the SEO ranking potential of the web application.
Graphs created using any of the Python or JavaScript graphing libraries can significantly reduce the load speed of the web application into which it gets integrated due to the time taken to interpret and execute the respective programming language. Even if we load such a graph separately from the web application, it will affect the user experience when a certain component gets loaded after the whole application has been loaded.
A CSS graph can overcome all these limitations and load in conjunction with the web application without reducing its load speed because HTML and CSS are the basic elements of any web application and do not take much time to execute.
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Responsiveness and Animation
When creating custom graphs for your web application, it is important to keep an eye on the responsiveness of the graph and the animation associated with it. The responsiveness of the graph is its ability to resize depending on the width of the device on which the web application is getting displayed. For example, the graph should resize and be presentable on all kinds of devices like PCs, tablets, and mobiles. The animation associated with the graph also plays an important role in the user experience and should be designed carefully to enable a smooth transition between different elements of the graph. For example, the appearance of a tooltip and hover state changes on the graph.
CSS graphs can achieve these features through the use of basic CSS properties like CSS animations, hover state stylings, and CSS media queries.
Customizability and Design
Web applications need to meet specific design standards when integrating components into their pages, like having a uniform color theme, placing elements in specific locations, and many other design rules. Through the use of CSS, all these design standards can be met when integrating a new component into web applications. CSS can uniformly style and place the new component in the required position.
Similarly, CSS graph is also highly customizable by exploiting a large range of CSS properties. Through the use of these CSS properties, the custom graph can be made to satisfy most of the design needs of the web application and can be placed at specific locations in the web application as required by the design.
Ease of Implementation and Integration
Another critical aspect of creating custom graphs for your web application is to implement the design and create the said graph relatively faster and without learning new technologies that have a steep learning curve like any of the Python or JavaScript graphing libraries.
CSS is very easy to implement and has a plethora of web resources explaining its endless list of properties that can be used to implement a CSS graph. Most Front End developers are already familiar with CSS and can implement a CSS graph faster without investing time in studying custom graphing libraries.
A CSS graph can also be integrated into a web application seamlessly as the structure of a CSS graph is represented through simple HTML tags like div and span. And these HTML tags form the basic structure of any web application.
Conclusion
In conclusion, using CSS to create custom graphs for web applications can greatly improve the performance and flexibility of your web application. CSS graphs are faster to load, easy to update, and more responsive and interactive. Additionally, CSS can help reduce the amount of code needed to create custom graphs, making it easier to maintain and update them.
The example of BVR Quadrant, a custom graph created by ShortHills Tech, demonstrates the power of CSS-based graphs in visualizing data and improving business analytics. By following a detailed guide, such as the one provided in the blog post "How to create a custom graph using HTML and CSS", developers can create their own CSS-based graphs and enhance their web applications. Overall, using CSS to create custom graphs is a powerful tool for web developers looking to improve the user experience and overall performance of their web applications.