great_tables - The Design Philosophy of Great Tables

Text is the most ubiquitous and the least user-friendly interface to information that we have. We have plots, we have graphs, we have tables. All of these are great. They are optimized for various different kinds of things for different uses. 

Text is not optimized for anything at all. It's just a thing that we inherited from 3,000 years a

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As you explore this document, imagine a world where we expect every claim to be accompanied by an explorable analysis, and every statistic to be linked to a primary source. Imagine collecting data and designing analyses in a collaborative wiki-like manner.

In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you get better results if you use flexible media.

But while the technology to distribute our ideas has grown in leaps and bounds, the interfaces have remained largely the same.