I wrote this Java applet to teach myself how to do it about ten years ago. It's unfortunate that there was no demand for Java in the mid-1990s (at least that I could find) to get better at it. If you want to use it in your web page, download the following two files from http://www.claytoncramer.com/java/:
I have revised the Java using Eclipse, and with the somewhat more demanding Java 1.6 compiler, mostly as a way to teach myself to use Eclipse.
It expects to read a csv file. The file that produced the data below:
Department,Suffering Imposed,2001,2002,2003,2004,2005,2006,2007,2008
Software,Layoff,128,94,22,25,26,28,39,250
Hardware,Layoff,38,15,20,35,45,20,50,300
Marketing,Layoff,20,1,50,45,20,25,38,60
Overpaid Upper Management,Layoff,0,0,0,0,0,0,3,5
The HTML that invokes it is easy to see if you View Source from your browser. There's only three lines of HTML, specifying the dimensions of the window, and the file name to feed into it. You can control what rows of data to display and the colors used from the Plot Config menu that appears in the browser. It is completely dynamic, scaling to fit the values of the data and number of columns and rows. Obviously, as the number of rows and columns increases, it gets less and less pleasant to read.
Use the Plot menu in the applet to change which categories to plot, and what the first color to use for the plot should be.