Hi Mike!

Great open source work. I've used d3 on many projects and, perhaps interesting to some, have used it often not as a charting library, but as a view/event model for DOM manipulation with advanced UI requirements (think dc.js and crossfiltering). This is after noticing that d3 works with large data sets very quickly - even those directly adding, removing, and editing DOM nodes & data.

My question for you is, broadly, where the speed of DOM manipulation comes from. Typically DOM interactions are very expensive in terms of execution time. I searched the docs and very briefly the source code to no avail.

Cheers, and thanks for open sourcing your work. It has been invaluable to my projects.