The technologies that became the world wide web were originally created to facilitate communications between researchers. One of the great ironies of digital age is that while the web has transformed nearly every aspect of our lives, it lags far behind in its original mission. Communications between researchers still make the PDF the default format for scholarly articles. Communications from researchers to the public tend to rely on general-purpose content management systems, and there is a lack of dedicated tooling needed by researchers and science communicators.
One area where the current web lags far behind its potential is the visual display of quantitative information. Web pages are documents, but they are also software, meaning that any data graphic can be rescalable, interactive, and directly linkable to the underlying data. Yet many charts on the web today provide a poor experience for users: they are often to load due to heavy resources, portray data inaccuately, are illegible on mobile