D3 map scrollers
geoexamples.com
geoexamples.com
You can't do this with <canvas /> and that's why I think it falls a bit short. With the virtual DOM it also gets harder "changing stuff from the console", but I guess there are extensions that allow you to do that as well.
But anyway, the DOM seems like a great abstraction, not just for doing UI, but also for building complex dataviz. But not because of performance, or because it's on "the Web". Simply because it's transparent and allows for copy-paste viral effect. We should keep this in mind when building future platforms.
Too bad you can't fix it as it is now, it'll be nice if somehow for a limited time you could revert your vote.
https://github.com/1wheel/graph-scroll
https://github.com/WSJ/scroll-watcher
And the classic blog post:
There's also some minor horizontal scroll which makes the experience slightly weird, but this can easily be fixed with overflow-x: hidden;