Have you ever look at your computer’s downloads folder, and see a .doc file? How about .xls? .ppt? And now, what about a .dash, reprensenting a dashboard? Despite being a major driver of decisions and data presentation, dashboard formats are almost always not downloadable or open.
This is what Dash Schema is for, a structured JSON-schema for storing informational dashboard snapshots It’s just a json file though, no new extension needed. Think of it as a format that can be easily read and written by any programming language or generative AI, and can easily be persisted locally or in the cloud.
This format intends to be useful for many different use cases of dashboard. It aims to be pragmatic over dogmatic, e.g., no shaming for using pie charts. The actual rendering of this format into a visualization is handled by different code paths. The project aims to build reference implementations for various platforms available in the future. This includes web, mobile web, PDF, and more.
Dashboards are a broad concept at the intersection of data, presentation, user interaction, device and platform, user locale and language, and more. The format aims to have sane defaults to make easy things easy, and hard things possible. While this format supports various visualization widgets, it is not a visualization library. From experience, simpler visualizations are easier to understand and are more likely to be useful, so it’s recommended to limit custom visualizations to only when necessary.
This is a work in progress and is not yet stable. Don’t expect stability until declared. When it’s stable, it will be versioned using semver. Initial versions will aim for simplicity. A more comprehensive version will eventually be released, as a proper superset of the simplified version, for more advanced use cases.