The use of colour is just as important as spatial layout! Where are you getting all this nonsense from?
Dumbest. Example. Ever.
Print that map in greyscale* -- it's still useful.
Print it without the spatial information but with colors. Now good luck using it. OK if we color code all the towns on the same lines, it's still MARGINALLY useful.
But we need to order them to see which stops appear in which order (don't know about you, but to get off at a given stop on a crowded train, I usually check to see which stops I'll be passing BEFORE I get to it). So we need simple spatial relationships (order) JUST to navigate a single line.
But, I still need to see how to get from A which is on one line to B which is on another line. Hmm, maybe using spatial relationships to show where different stops and lines are might be helpful.
(The great innovation in the original design of the London tube map wasn't color -- older maps used color and were incomprehensible; it was simplifying the map to show only the minimum amount of spatial information necessary to explain the relationships of stops to one another.)
I'm not saying color isn't helpful on the London Underground map, but it's a small number of colors and they represent the only things the user cares about besides actual stops. If I'm trying to follow the red line, then I just need to remember "red". I don't need to remember 53 icons, 44 keyboard shortcuts, and 25 arbitrarily assigned colors -- which is what you'd be doing in Cheetah 3D or most computer programs.
Again, syntax coloring (JavaScript in your example) is completely different. If you use red = keywords, blue = symbols, orange = string literals, etc. then, first of all, each instance of a red keyword reinforces the relationship. Second, you're usually dealing with a fairly small number of mappings and/or you can also relate the mappings to each other logically (e.g. all literals can be shades of orange). Third, you're not editing something intrinsically colored so the colors of what you're working on don't clash with the colors of the UI. Fourth, you're generally looking at very bright text on a black background or very bold text on a white background -- not captions on colored backgrounds, which suck. Since we're talking about a GRAPHICS program here what you're proposing is analogous to sticking lots of arbitrary TEXT labels next to every bit of text (e.g. a little "vcg" next to any variable). Note that text is a lot easier to make non-arbitrary which is why captions are more useful than colors, but even having a little floating text saying "variable" next to each variable would be highly annoying and not useful.
* The ONLY purpose color is serving is to help tell lines apart. (And this isn't analogous to the problem in Cheetah 3D which is to find specific items in the user interface. If the label "Specular" were on the left side of the screen and the specular field appeared on the other side of the screen with no caption, OK then color might be helpful there. If this map were interactive, I'd use ONE color to highlight the line I was interested in, and I'd show the name of the line next to the line.)
BTW: guess what I do for a living? (At least right at this moment.) Take a wild guess.
