Sparklines are described in detail in Edward Tufte's book Beautiful Evidence (2006), more particularly page 54 comparing baseball team performances. Such sparklines are sometimes also referred to as tentacle lines.
The dataset used here is not index-based. If it was, every stock's performance would start at value 100 in the first year and evolve from there. Such data transformation has to be performed outside of vega-lite 2 for now.
Among the current issues, one can note the absence of defining custom rules in vega-lite allowing to solve the label colliding problem.
This block has been forked from Domoritz's Vega-Lite Block example.