Practicality vs Esthetics in DataViz

We want both. We want for something to be practical and nice looking as possible. We want the shiny doorknob to look elegant, but we also want it to work smoothly without having to jiggle it, and not to need cleaning all the time. Sometimes one has to be given up for the other, an industrial assembly line may be a little grimy all the time but it gets the job done; of course, cleanliness may be a desired property of the object and practicality and esthetics share a common cause.

Sometimes we want something that is esthetically pleasing and superficially practical but not necessarily perfectly practical, like a watch with no face numbers.  The esthetics is the desired intention.

That's all philosophy diatribe to justify something that bugs the crap out of me.

Basically wordles are the worst. And periodic tables (except for The Periodic Table which is the best). And usually subway diagrams (except for actual city subways). Here's one for semantic web technologies:

This! This is the worstest.

If you know what each of the entities are, and you make all sorts of qualifications, maybe this makes sense a little. It makes only the slightest bit more of sense if 'A above B' means A is 'built on B'. But then there are all sorts of 'If you did that, then why did you do that?' questions (why is encryption and signature off to the side only for some, why is logic and proof separate, is Unicode really such a huge important base technology, etc etc). Wait, isn't a namespace a particular kind of URI? There are many variations on the 'Semantic Web Stack', but each in its own way has all these "I don't get why they did that?" problems. This is all about esthetics (Nice color combo!) and little to do with imparting coherent information. No, you will not learn anything from this. Wait...what the hell is 'signature'?