State persistence for link sharing

[dyf]

I'd like to be able to bookmark my URL and share it with others with the expectation that my view will persist when opened elsewhere. We would love to use this to be able to generate and share curated views of our large scale OME-zarr data.

You could perhaps persist state in the URL. The only additional ask would be the option to specify a JSON file that contains the state as well, since sometimes these URLs get quite long.

[PaulHax]

❤️ this idea. What is the most important state we should persist in the URL? Perhaps to start with:

• camera pose
• gradient opacity (one of the sliders)
• color map
• ???

For now, pick bits of state piecemeal. Serializing all the state would not be trivial in its current incarnation.

[dyf]

Great! Those for sure, maybe also background color and the transfer function.

[PaulHax]

Talked with @thewtex about this. Thinking we will focus effort on a next generation viewer that will serialize all state to the URL.

But, happy to support any effort adds this feature to this viewer.

[dyf]

@PaulHax I see. Well I will be very curious to follow the development of the next gen viewer.