Timeline

This is an experimental implementation of the Timeline framework presented by MIT's SIMILE group.

African countries' year of independence (data from "World" MySQL database).

Local name displays on the timeline; click to view English name.

 

How to set up the timeline

  1. Set up an HTML file following the basic steps on the Getting Started page (steps 1-3).
  2. Create an XML file (or use the example file). Theoretically you can use SIMILE's Babel to convert an Excel file to XML:
    1. Copy the contents of the Excel file onto the clipboard.
    2. Under "from format", choose Tab-separated values.
    3. Under "to format", choose RDF/XML.
    4. Under "data to convert", choose "the data is text I can paste into this web page" AND mime-type "application/xml".
    5. Click Upload and Convert. Save the resulting xml file into the same directory as your html page.

    3. ...but I had trouble with this. Eventually I found the best way to create a conforming XML file was to:

    1. open their example1.xml
    2. edit it with Excel (2002 or 2003 only)
    3. ...and save the result as XML Data. This preserves the formatting that the Timeline javascript seems to like.
  3. Change the relevant date fields to "start" and "end", respectively, and the label you wish to display in the timeline to "title".
  4. Link to this XML file in the code you copied from the Getting Started instructions.
  5. Adjust the timeline: %height of top band and lower band; default start date;
  6. Style the div to modify the timeline's appearance.

The timeline is even more useful when combined with a data table and categories using Exhibit.

 

<- back to index | ©2007 clg.