Talk:Test/Chap Timeline

Example of Timeline Integration

Could be good to do something like: http://discoursedb.org/wiki/2011_United_Nations_recognition_vote_of_Palestinian_state Robin (talk) 10:13, 1 January 2014 (GMT)

Yes, it would. I've got several other sets of timeline data near ready to go too, but waiting to clarify which timeline extension to settle on. The Simile product has been tweeked such that it can now be hard-zoomed between two specified dates. That makes it fairly OK (but not ideal) for the JKF timeline. You can also specify a centering date whereas the original only allowed start,centre, end, today. However, I'm in heavy-duty contact with the Chaps-Timeline author over some enhancements/modifications that would effectively make the Simile product redundant (It is not a maintained extension either) - principally its existing Zoom facility. You can see that in operation here (Just do a hard page-refresh if it doesn't display first time). It has far more potential than the Simile one but needs enhancing for effective use on the data I have in mind. I'll keep you posted --Peter P (talk) 10:28, 1 January 2014 (GMT)

Ideas

• Parameters: to limit the zooming, to set initial zoom level - I see little benefit in zooming well beyond the range of events (2500AD?, -1000?) so preventing this can only help users. Robin (talk) 16:06, 2 February 2014 (GMT)

There are few things needed before formally adopting it. Setting initial zoom level is one, centering on a specified date-time another. I'm still pressing the author on them. He's a young Russian guy living in St Petersburg - v competent but busy on other stuff. I've bee experimenting with a template to format the event bubbles but can't seem to get the text color to change - boldfacing and size work but not color. Hope to get there with it soon though --Peter P (talk) 16:22, 2 February 2014 (GMT)

Use of Categories

I see that the timeline currently uses a category to decide what to display. This is easy to think about and works fine for testing the software. However, it mitigates against dynamic use of such timelines - since as long as they rely on categories, we are limited to one per category, rather than being pulled up on an ad hoc basis where needed. Robin (talk) 04:28, 3 February 2014 (GMT)

That's just this one instance experiment with it - It got me going. I'm well aware that the display of events on a timeline has far more complex and interesting potential when the selection is done with properties. The only requirement, is that the events generated by such a query should have at least a date. The content of the timeline event bubbles themselves is customizable with a template which can itself be complex too. The title on any such timeline - or timeline page would be a succinct explanation of the query used to select its constituent events. Interesting possibilities in connecting disparate events with no other obvious connection. --Peter P (talk) 06:45, 3 February 2014 (GMT)