Google Image Charts

» see chart.googleapis.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

There is a category of tool that a working engineer meets without ever choosing it, and this was one. You needed a bar chart in a page or a status email, you did not want a plotting library in the build, so you wrote a URL with the numbers in it and put that URL in an img tag. The chart came back as a PNG. No account, no key, no client-side anything.

It went up on 6 December 2007. A team in Zurich had built it as a twenty percent project for internal use, on Google Video and Google Finance, and Google decided the rest of the web might as well have it too. The announcement called it one of the simplest APIs they had ever shipped, which was accurate and turned out to be the whole reason it was so hard to kill later.

The thing spread into places nobody planned for. It ended up in wiki pages and in dashboards with no owner, and above all in a very large amount of PHP that produced two-factor enrollment QR codes, because the API had a QR type and you could get a scannable code out of it in one line with no library.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a chart url looked like ~

The grammar was short parameters and pipes. cht set the chart type, chs set the size in pixels, chd carried the data in one of a few encodings that existed to keep the URL under length limits. A pie chart of four numbers fit in a tweet. You could hand the URL to somebody in chat and they would see the chart, which is a property almost no charting tool has had since.

~ seven years of deprecated ~

Google deprecated the image half of Chart Tools on 20 April 2012, promising availability until April 2015 under its deprecation policy, and pushed everybody toward the JavaScript charts library. Then April 2015 passed and the server kept answering, and it went on answering for four more years after the date Google had committed to.

The reason is not mysterious. Deprecating an API is a document; turning one off is an outage in somebody else's product. Every year the hostname stayed up, more code got written against it by people who had never read the deprecation notice, and by 2019 the install base of a dead API was larger than it had been on the day it was declared dead.

~ the two warning outages ~

Jon Orwant posted to the chart API group on 9 February 2019. The service depended on infrastructure Google was not going to keep supporting, he wrote, and it would be turned off on 14 March. To flush out anyone still relying on it without knowing, there would be two rehearsals first: about an hour on Wednesday 13 February, and several hours on Tuesday 5 March.

Both outages worked exactly as intended, in that the bug trackers of open source projects filled up with people discovering they had a Google dependency. The 2FA libraries got hit worst, since a broken enrollment QR code stops new users cold and looks like a bug in the library rather than a decision made in Mountain View seven years earlier.

The replacement is a JavaScript library, which is fine in a browser and useless anywhere a browser is not running, starting with email. chart.googleapis.com returns a 404 today. Somewhere in every old codebase there is still an img tag pointing at it, rendering nothing.

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