[dwallin]

I think it's a mistake to just drop most of the data and then try to rebuild the lost data afterwards.

Nothing requires you send just a set of points across. A better approach is to transform and compress the data BEFORE sending it across the wire. This way you get the benefit of using all the available data to create a more accurate simplification.

For example, each update take your cursor point set and construct a bezier curve that best fits the data.

[philsnow]

Nobody will ever see this response since the article was posted 3 days ago but:

Another advantage of doing it this way is that the sender can downsample on large/gross movements that would render faithfully as splines with fewer points, and send more samples on tight movements.

If you're not sending uniformly-spaced (in time) samples, though, you'll want some kind of timing information encoded as well.