I was looking at the Design Observer website today and saw the link for texone’s html tree visualization. I’m quite fond of seeing how many different ways people can take HTML and parse it into something visual. So, above is three shots of my website as the input for visualization. From left to right, the index page, about 10 pages of the site, and letting it go for about a half an hour. Like all HTML visualizations confined to the space of the screen, it ends up becoming a jumbled mess when you let it sit and run for a good amount of time.

I do like this project, though it does have some areas that I find irksome. For starters, it doesn’t try to show the relationship between pages, just randomly puts a tree (page) in the space. The coloring leaves something to be desired. I really would love to be able to move within the space and see the trees up close. I realize that as the forest gets more and more dense, this becomes very processor intensive. It also runs into a lot of the same problems I had to work through in my own HTML visualization project, Where It Went From… (and how it got there). Things like pages that have a different random string in their URL each time you visit, managing slashes in the URLs, javascript links and the like. But solving all these problems would be like writing a full-fledged browser, a daunting amount of work.