Back in the late '90's, I undertook a project for an English professor where we tried to create a stand-alone slide-show CD for him to take to his classes and customize for each lecture. I was convinced that we could do this in HTML, Javascript, and maybe Quicktime. It never did work. The state of the technology was lacking too much. But in the process, I learned what I wanted to know and this became my Honors Thesis. Ever since then I have been watching the technology mature with bated breath. A few years later, with the advent of XML, CSS, and flash drive technology, I began to believe that the project was possible. I am no longer a student, and I certainly have larger fish to fry, but I have always wondered if I should finish that project with what I know now.
I have always felt the magnetic force of liberated, mobile and adaptable content. The SIMILE projects from MIT are great examples of this concept. In preparation for writing several novels, I have been assembling chronological data on the ancients. In order to visualize this data, I considered creating timelines in HTML, manually. Then I found SIMILE Timeline. When I first saw it, I let out a literal whoop!
Timeline is even better than I had hoped. The data is separate from the presentation, the presentation is layered and modular, and the code is concise and elegant (what I've seen of it). To top it off, everything runs in the browser (very AJAX-like), so there is minimal supporting technology required!
Now I have just begun to create these timelines out of my notes, so take a look at some of the examples provided by SIMILE until I have mine ready for beta testing.
