Today there was a post on the Simile mailing list on elastic timelines. In his post Joao Severino refers to a change in the timeline code by Liming Xu which is described in more detail on his blog.
The general idea is to identify overlapping events and then redefine the height of the timeline accordingly. Though I don’t think it’s very useful as it leads to very high timelines, I wonder to what extent this idea could be used to resolve a big issue with the vertical timeline which I use for the blog archive on this blog. If there are two events very close to each other in a vertical timeline, they will automatically overlap.
Potentially this could be resolved by combining hot zones (which currently need to be defined explicitly) with his idea of automatically adjusting the height of the timeline. The Timeline code would check whether two events overlap and add a hot zone for the area of the events.
Two problems would remain:
- Events which occur at the same time or so close that the hot zone would cover a very short time (minutes or so).
This could be handled by a kind of summary event that basically says: here are two (or more events) at the same time, click for details. - Duration events.
I don’t know yet how to get this resolved in detail, but I’ll try it sometime.
Tags: Javascript, Timeline, Visualization