Notes to self on web map-style tree viewers. The basic idea is to use Google Maps or Leaflet to display a tree. Hence we need to compute tiles. One approach is to use a database that supports spatial queries to store the x,y coordinates of the tree. When we draw a tile we compute the coordinates of that tile, based on position and zoom level, do a spatial query to extract all lines that intersect with the rectangle for that tile, and draw those.
A nice example of this is Lifemap (see also De Vienne, D. M. (2016). Lifemap: Exploring the Entire Tree of Life. PLOS Biology, 14(12), e2001624. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.2001624).
It occurs to me that for trees that aren't too big we could do this without an external database. For example, what if we used a Javascript implementation of an R-tree, such as imbcmdth/RTree or its fork leaflet-extras/RTree. So, we could compute the coordinates of the nodes in the tree in "geographic" space, store the bounding box for each line/arc in an R-tree, then query that R-tree for lines that intersect with the bounding box of the relevant tile. We could use a clipping algorithm to only draw the bits of the lines that cross the tile itself.
Web maps, at least in my experience, make trips to a tile server to fetch a tile, we would want instead to call a routine within our web page, because all the data would be loaded into that page. So we'd need to modify the tile creating code.
The ultimate goal would be to have a single page web app that accepts a Newick-style tree and converts into a browsable, zoomable visualisation.
