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Really great to have a case study like this for knowing when to use SVG/DOM or Canvas.

I knew that Canvas can easily be redrawn 60fps for things like games (though it may overheat your laptop). Didn't know about using them as shiftable tiles though. What a great way to minimize redraw! Is this how most online maps work?

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Tiling is a very common technique for online maps. Image tiles used to be the standard, but there has been a lot of progress made with vector tiles (what the new Google Maps uses), mainly due to the huge improvements in browser performance as well as greater support of WebGL . Take a look at Mapbox GL, a very cool vector tile renderer:

https://www.mapbox.com/blog/mapbox-gl-js/

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