Re: [Gmod-ajax] Similie

[Mitch S. <mit...@be...>]

Aanensen, David wrote:
> have you by any chance seen MIT's Similie project -   Timeline widget?

Yeah, I've looked at it and read some of their code.  Actually, that was 
one of the things I used to try and justify the div approach.

The code is MIT licensed, so we could incorporate it if we wanted to.  I 
like the popups that point to the thing they describe.

The reason I thought it would be good to go in a somewhat different 
direction was because they have a slightly different set of goals and 
constraints.  Scale, like you mentioned, is one thing that I think we're 
much more interested in.  And scale concerns have driven some of the 
differences in how I'm doing things, like using the browser's built-in 
scrolling functionality rather than scrolling by changing the position 
CSS attributes.

The zooming thing is another difference.  In a genome browser, I think 
you're really interested in the relationships between things that are 
vastly different in size.  For example, you want to be able to see how a 
SNP relates to a gene that's tens of thousands of bases, but on a 
timeline it's less important IMO to see where a single day falls in a 
span of a few hundred years.  So zooming is something that I think we 
want to spend more effort on.  And getting that to work drove some more 
differences with Timeline.

Generally speaking, it's good to set a high bar for rolling your own 
implementation of something, but on the whole I think that our 
particular set of needs is fairly unique and deserves some amount of 
bespoke code.

I do want to make use of as much existing work as possible, though, from 
simile, prototype, scriptaculous, dojo, openlaszlo, gbrowse, catalyst, 
wherever.

Mitch