holoviz
Roadmap updates
Since we're releasing 1.0, I think it may be worth revisiting hvPlot’s default settings to elevate the out-of-the-box UI/UX and follow some best data visualization practices from books like Storytelling Data Visualization and/or How Charts Lie, or at least document how to do it in hvPlot.
Many users reach for Plotly or Seaborn because their defaults are immediately more visually appealing (and in Seaborn’s case, offer built-in statistical plotting). We could also document how to better integrate with websites, dashboards, and publications.
These are all great ideas! I'll personally focus on the items I listed (if they're fine with other maintainers), so if you want your suggestions to be part of the 1.0 release, it's likely you'll have to do the work yourself, including reaching consensus on the new UI/UX defaults (which should be possible).
The visually appealing part, I think it's a matter of changing up the themes as the default, which shouldn't be a huge lift, e.g. https://medium.com/@pYdeas/create-publication-styled-figures-with-hvplot-using-the-bokeh-backend-b623ab48a5d2
Perhaps adding more themes to Bokeh, and then documenting how to use themes in hvplot, which currently has no documentation on (https://hvplot.holoviz.org/en/docs/latest/search.html?q=theme). Also pretty sure AI can help with it as well :)
Did you want me to edit the roadmap with these new desired changes, or wait for others to comment?
For the books, I think I need to re-review what's in them. One of them I just remember is ensuring the legends ordering semi-match with the lines' min to max, or simply adding labels directly to the lines, like this:
If we can add some easy way for users to do this, like hvplot ui/ux util methods to do this, I think that'd be great.
which shouldn't be a huge lift
Technically indeed I guess that's not a big lift. Coming up with a set of defaults we all agree on will be the challenge for you.
Perhaps adding more themes to Bokeh, and then documenting how to use themes in hvplot, which currently has no documentation on (https://hvplot.holoviz.org/en/docs/latest/search.html?q=theme). Also pretty sure AI can help with it as well :)
Having more Bokeh themes sounds good, especially if they're well-maintained and thoroughly developed. In the Python viz landscape there are already well-known themes that I'm sure would be interesting to make available in Bokeh (stock matplotlib, seaborn, plotly, ggplot, etc.), which in turn would make them available in HoloViews and hvPlot. Creating a new theme from scratch sounds more challenging.
Adding documentation on how to set a theme in hvPlot sounds like a great idea, I think that would be a how-to.
Did you want me to edit the roadmap with these new desired changes, or wait for others to comment?
Well I'm okay with that being part of the 1.0 roadmap but I'd suggest you create first a separate issue and add more details about what you intend to do before the 1.0 release. I've already discussed multiple times the other items (docs, test suite refactor, pie charts, narwhals) so there was already some sort of agreement.
If we can add some easy way for users to do this, like hvplot ui/ux util methods to do this, I think that'd be great.
I'm not sure what you mean with util methods. Probably worth being discussed in another issue.
I liked your last suggestion to express them as development principles and integrated it as such in https://github.com/holoviz/hvplot/pull/1694/commits/4c15db019b2cef7e0b11dc292b19375a8b5959c6.