[danso]

Implementation difficulties aside, isn't the ideal solution to provide well-executed zooming ability on the data, a la Google Finance charts?

http://www.google.com/finance?cid=694653

The problem with view panning is that you are not able to easily compare the viewable scope of data with the entire dataset. With a zoomable view, some granularity is lost...but I suspect the majority of use-cases would get more benefit out of seeing the "big picture" than merely being able to see each datapoint...and if seeing each datapoint was important, that kind of specificity is better implemented through tabular data rather than chart visualization.

[seliopou]

Definitely. Focus + context is the first technique you should consider using to solve the data visualization problem I described. However, my goal was to explain how to do bounded panning in D3, which is useful when solving other, more complex data visualization problems. To simplify the explanation, I picked a simple problem.

Here's a focus + context example in D3: http://bl.ocks.org/1667367