You are correct, that with many of these apps, the main bottleneck is getting the browser to update the dom (whether or not a piece of it is visible). There is indeed an approach to dealing with this problem, essentially to keep track of which elements of the view are actually visible at a given time, and draw only those images. A good example of this approach can be found in the following paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1294211.1294235 (I haven't found an openly-accessible copy). I saw the system demoed at the conference and it was impressively snappy, even on a very large data set.
Of course, this isn't a minor feature; it requires significant work to build a system this way. Hopefully someday it can be done for timeline (and exhibit) -David Ron Van den Branden wrote: > Hi, > > We've been experimenting with Timeline as an interface for an electronic > text edition of drafts and notebooks used by literary authors. In > principle, we think it could be the basis for a very promising > visualisation of search results on a time-based document collection. > > However, a demo application with a data file containing over 3200 events > proved fairly slow already (probably too slow for researchers to > comfortably work with the timeline). Rather than its size (over 3 Mb), > the Javascript-driven drawing of the sheer amount of events seems to be > the bottleneck (deleting all events' text didn't improve performance). > Since these sample data consist of only one fourth of the intended > amount of data of the total edition, my question is: what would be the > most sensible way to have Timeline deal with huge data collections? Is > there a way to 'cut off' drawing of events to just the current visible > 'time window'? > > Kind regards, > > Ron > > > > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > [email protected] > http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general > _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
