Comparison Grids

Feature comparison grids come in two forms:

• • comparing a company's own offerings with themselves

  • comparing a company's offering with someone else's offerings

Examples:

• • Here's a grid comparing Drupal starter themes: http://triglobal.nl/do/drupal6starterthemes.html

How do these normally get created? For the web, using straight up table HTML. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's tedious work.

How do these get updated? How does one collaborate on a grid?

Maybe this exists already, but here's what I envision for a web app:

• • a wizard to get started quickly

  • each grid has its own ID

  • each offering goes on the horizontal axis

  • each feature goes on the vertical axis

  • each feature has a field type

    • yes/no

    • numeric

    • text

    • image

  • each feature gets notes, since it's not always black and white

  • each grid is embeddable as a widget, so that if you change it on the web app, it gets changed everywhere

  • each grid exports stripped down HTML with sensible CSS IDs and classes for copy & pasting then later CSS/JS manipulation

  • the app can host a "landing page", which you can CNAME your subdomain to, with some ability to change colour and drop in an image or two, but that's it. One or two "themes".

  • drag and drop columns to set some offering against another

  • drag and drop rows to set features against each other

  • a short URL to share via the condensed text social networks

  • sensible "long" URLs