Is it time to add new life to this project?

[garex]

Hi Dmitry.

I'm just writing a public letter to you. Seems like you have many interesting things in your life. But this project is forgotten and it's miss you. More than 50 PRs (not all ideal) are waiting and may be they are never will be merged :(

What do you think if this repo will be added some top contributors to write access mode? Then this "write board" could clean up PRs with good ideas/fixes.

Have a nice twenty for hours :)

[rzurad]

As the guy who spent a lot of time getting g.raphael to work with Raphael 2.0 a few years ago, I support this. My schedule has been too busy (and I'm not sure where KarolK went, but I assume he's also moved on to other things) and I consider this project to be dead in light of the development of SVG support in modern browsers.

To me, Raphael.JS solved the problem of providing an interface to do SVG in a world where SVG and VML were competing for dominance. At this point in time, SVG has won, so while to use Raphael is to use a better API for drawing vector graphics, it's crippled by the fact that it has to cater to a lowest-common-denominator by making sure that everything it does also works in VML, and VML does not support everything that SVG does. To me, nobody should care about VML anymore. I realize that this is not always possible since some still need to cater to low-grade IE browsers, but this is not something that is on my radar anymore, and thus it is hard for me to find time to dedicate to issues I consider to be obsolete (My personal recommendation is to use d3js for anything related to data-visualization, unless you absolutely require VML support)

If anyone wants to maintain this library and manage it, I'm all for it, but I currently don't have access to add more contributors to the project that I am aware of (is it even possible for a contributor with write access to add more contributors with write access on github?). I'm a contributor to this repo, not the owner, so it looks like I can't give people write access to it without going through Dmitry and I'm not sure if he regularly checks this board.

[sikuda]

I absolutely agree that the use of VLM in browsers is out of date.
But my work is related to the monopoly of the market application systems Russia 1C-Enterprise. And there within the client IE works in compatibility mode, and the situation has not changed for several years. So crutches VLM help me a lot.

[rustedwolf]

Personally, I believe this project should not be marked Dead yet. Of course, there are other fine libraries for drawing charts in canvas or svg. But Raphael.js has it's ease of use, plus it's more convenient to for developer to use the chart drawing library which has dependencies which developer is familiar with. F.eg. it will take time for developer who did svg on Raphael, go and make charts with nvD3, because he needs to learn a new library (D3).

Additional libraries make demand for the main one. Like many libraries require jQuery and that what makes jQuery more in demand and keeps it alive. We cannot use Raphalel.js to draw charts, if there's no library for them, unless you have project unlimited time, which is very unlikely.

Still, as @sikuda mentioned, there is a demand for libraries with legacy software/hardware support. And canvas is still has it's performance problems on low hardware. And this project could provide all this.