Beauty of Code

I tested the simile timeline menu on the left in Safari, but since I haven’t spent much time on it yet, I forgot to test IE and Firefox – with embarrassing results, it didn’t work at all as I learned today.

It quickly turned out that the problem was in the following two lines:

...
<script src="/wp-content/themes/boc/timeline-api.js" type="text/javascript"/>
<script type="text/javascript">
...

I was naive enough to expect that any decent browser wouldn’t have any problems with the first line, but it turned out that IE and Firefox DID NOT process the “/>” at the end of the first line. To be more precise, the javascript that followed the second line has not been processed at all, because the browsers were confused by the end of the first line.

When I changed it to 

...
<script src="/wp-content/themes/boc/timeline-api.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
...

everything worked fine. To be honest, I don’t understand why. If anyone can explain me the background of this behaviour – please leave a comment.

BTW: Safari worked as expected.

In 2006, some guys at the Simile project at MIT (especially D. F. Huynh)  introduced an AJAX tool called timeline, which visualizes timelines, i.e. events in their chronological order. When I started this blog, I thought about adding some timeline visualization for my blog entries, ideally in form of some wordpress plugin. Well, I probably won’t write any timeline plugin for wordpress, as I found one today that uses the above mentioned tool: the wordpress simile plugin.

I have downloaded it and this is the result, without any further editing:

I need to adjust it a bit in the next days, but shouldn’t be difficult to get it modified.

At the end of the day, I would like to embed the timeline into the design template for this blog, for example at the top, where the search is currently located.

I consider this kind of timeline as a very useful technology, as long as it can be used by as many people as possible. This means that using it in your own website must be very easy. The data retrieval is probably the big problem. To have a tool like this widely adopted, anyone must be able to extract data from a blog, from wikipedia, google, any of the big names in the internet etc.

I’ll investigate the possibilities in more detail during the next weeks.