[Gmod-ajax] Feature Mark Up

[Steve T. <st...@mo...>]

Hi,

I thought I'd send this to open up the discussions on the new list!:-)

I haven't checked in this code yet but I have modified generate-tiles.pm and BatchTilesImage.pm to allow marking up of the features in each of the tiles using client side image maps. We may want to 
change this later to do CSS maps but that would be only a small code modification. It basically generates an html file per tile with an inlined image and the appropriate map coordinates. The browser 
XMLHttpRequests the data over when it needs to using Ajax.Updater (from the js library Prototype).

You can see what it looks like on:

http://slave.molbiol.ox.ac.uk/gbrowse/TiledImage/ecoli/prototype_gbrowse.html

Try dragging and clicking on features.

Advantages of current implementation
-----------------------------------
- should work on all browsers and doesn't require any fancy javascript
- will support polygons, ellipses etc
- allows distribution on different servers for tiles

Disadvantages of implementation
-------------------------------
- all html per tile currently generated server side (not sure if this is an advantage or disadvantage at this stage) but may be a pain to do updates

Obviously where javascript:alert('Active image map') you should have the relevant details of the feature and a nicer pop up. The js alerts are pretty annoying at the moment when dragging! I intend to 
put js pop ups similar to the ones we have at http://gbrowse.molbiol.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/gbrowse/coli_demo/?name=U00096%3A1..10000.

Let me know what you think. I will check it in if people think it is worthwhile at this stage.

Regards,

Steve
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