AJAX Timeline

In the “How Cool is That!” Department: this very morning, i was looking (for the umpteenth time) for some not-invented-by-me and open/semi-standard way to author event information in an XML format, to be rendered graphically in the form of a timeline. I’d like to record and organize some major events of my life (while i can still remember most of them!) and have a visualization of the results: i’m also interested in expressing genealogical information this way. This time around, i found the Historical Event Markup Language project, which i intend to take a closer look at. It looks promising, and i said to myself at the time “wouldn’t it be cool to create a visual timeline of early Christian history?”.
So tonight, going to the SIMILE project at MIT’s web site, i found something new: their Timeline project, which offers a DHTML widget for making timelines. Check out this very detailed timeline of Jewish and Christian history: you really need a 100″ monitor to get the big picture here! (hint: the top inch or so is a control you grab to scroll the window right and left)

4 thoughts on “AJAX Timeline”

  1. Cool timeline, better than the one I saw and liked, with great features. BUT it requires one to write code to enter events or people. If only it had a simple interface we could get a bunch of biblical studies bloggers to create a timeline for the BCE period… Very useful for teachers.

  2. Tim:

    I’ve only briefly looked, but it appeared to me that the event data is well-separated from the display code. So yes, you have to write code to display the results, but the hard part of actually entering the data can be done completely separately in an XML format.

    I plan to give this a closer look …

  3. I guess what I am saying is that too often the techies (amateur as well as professional) produce a nce tool, but forget to make it user friendly for non-techie colleagues.

    I can see great potential, but though (I expect) I could quickly learn to code the data – I had to learn to write HTML in Notepad for my first websites – almost none of my colleagues would want to do such a thing. …and since they are Bible teachers not computer scientists why should they?

    The attitude in the Open Source community seems often build the framework of a better mousetrap, and let the user make it work for themselves!

  4. I have tested it, and it is indeed very simple for non-techies to create a timeline. See the cubism example.
    But it is also true, the software is created as add-on for other software

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