Glossary

Short definitions of the vocabulary used across this wiki. Seeded — expand as essays land.

• AST / GoFishNode — the tree a chart compiles to. Every mark and operator is a node. See Architecture Overview.
• Mark — a node with an appearance: rect, ellipse, line, area, text.
• Operator — a node that arranges children but draws nothing itself: stackX, spread, layer, coord, …
• Underlying space — what a dimension is: a position, a size, ordinal, or undefined. Drives which layout machinery runs. See Underlying Space.
• Domain — the data range a dimension spans, inferred in pass 1.
• Scale — a mapping from a data domain to a visual range (pixels, color).
• Bounding box (bbox) — the rectangle a node occupies; the common currency of layout. See The Bounding-Box Model.
• Monotonic — a monotonically-increasing function tracked symbolically so the engine can reason about data-to-pixel flow. See The Monotonic Module.
• Scenegraph flattening — collapsing a nested subtree into an absolutely-positioned flat list, done by coord. See Flattening the Scenegraph.

Planned contents

• Finish the term list (channel, flow/pipeline, ref, selection, coordinate transform).
• Link each term to its defining essay.