Then you have to deal with scaling, responsiveness, data decimation, etc. It's not really a good idea to just have a multi thousand point line chat rendered real tiny
If you know what size you're dealing with it's not a huge deal. You can quantize the data and for (small) sparklines that's probably fine because most people view them as miniature glimpses at data rather than granular and accurate.
Totally. I just mean that logic has to live somewhere, whether in client-side JS or a server. It's not a great practice to just blindly render SVGs out of raw data.
Aha, I misunderstood — I'd thought you were thinking of rendering multiple small SVGs.
Good point, although decimation for sparklines shouldn't be that difficult: I've done completely stupid decimation (recursively split stopping whenever linear fit is close enough) for live GPS traces and (because people are only using them qualitatively) no one ever complained.
