Dear Lazyweb, help!

I'm embarking on a number of summer projects in my new lab at MSU, and several of them focus on using pygr to do cool genomic stuff. In particular, I'm planning to build a personal genome annotation system that will let people run their own full genome Web sites and annotate the genomes with private information such as Solexa data, cDNA/EST projects, ChIP-seq, cis-regulatory reporter constructs, ncRNA predictions, etc. etc. (If you're interested in this sort of thing, get in touch -- it will, of course, be open source and open development, albeit in Python :)

As I've been thinking more about how to do the display side of things, I've been running headfirst into a serious lack of knowledge. I would like to make an interface that looks somewhat like your standard genome browser/GMOD/UCSC interface, such as this UCSC view of the chicken genome. I already have the basics of that view working; for example, see this simple example and a group-feature example. But I'd like to add more - a LOT more -- interactivity.

Ideally I'd like to be able to draw simple objects (squares, rectangles, lines) on some sort of canvas and then use JavaScript and AJAX to pop up windows and display bits of information. But I don't really know this space of functionality very well.

So I'm turning to the lazyweb.

Are JavaScript+image maps the right way to go (for example, this, this, and this)? Do they work well with multiple browsers? Or are there good JS libraries for drawing images on the fly in the browser? Is SVG a good thing to look at? Were you stuck with this task, what would you use?

The most important things for this project are, in order of importance:

• basic functionality (JS image maps seem fine for this)
• cross-browser functionality
• selection (e.g. GMOD RubberBandSelection)
• flexibility: reordering and redrawing of images.

Your thoughts are much appreciated! Please drop me a line or comment, whichever is most convenient. I'll summarize the options.

thanks,

--titus

p.s. I'm perfectly fine with "Google this, dumby!" I just don't have much in the way of google keyword knowledge in this area...