I'd like to announce a new Labs tool to show a periodic table
<https://tools.wmflabs.org/ptable/>.
It is based on WikiPeriod's PHP code (in turn ported from JavaScript)
and features several improvements:
* 'tiles' are wider and taller;
* most of them are now provided with a background color (the same as
Wikipedia's
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table#Periodic_table_legend_for_category>)
based on the elements' "subclass of" property
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P279> (the same that powers
period/group detection);
* for labels, Wikidata's built-in language fallback is used instead of
just falling back to English;
* a public JSON API <https://tools.wmflabs.org/ptable/api> is
available for everyone!
And some more under the hood:
* rewritten in Python with Jinja2:
o more object-oriented
o presentation is split from actual logic
o less vulnerable to XSS attacks
* a LRU (least recently used) cache with a maximum TTL (per-item
time-to-live) value of 6 hours is used to avoid hitting data sources
on every request;
* both the Wikidata API and Wikidata Query can be used interchangeably
as sources.
I had to create some items such as Q19753344
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q19753344> and Q19753345
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q19753345> to properly categorize
elements. My knowledge of chemistry is limited, so please report/fix
every mistake you can find ;-)
Future plans include:
* oxidation state
* images
* responsive design
* alternative table structures