Timeline

This project pulls timelines from Wikipedia, parses them and puts them into a coherent zoomable view. This is mostly inspired by Huang's great Flash app "The Scale of the Universe" and George Santayana's famous quote.

I have tested this only in Chrome so far.

Use the scroll wheel togehter with the shift key to zoom in or out. '+', '-' and the cursor keys should also work.

"Ma" stands for "Million years ago".

The source code is available at github.com/stefanhaustein/timeline.

Features I'd like to add:

1. Add more photos (moon landing etc.) to data.js
2. Show larger photo on hover?
3. Support images for regular words in content.
4. Automatically zoom out when srolling into "boring" regions
5. Add graphs to the gutter: If you click a data field (e.g. CO₂), plot it on the time scale (turning off the photo feature when it is implemented)
6. Switchable topic timelines, e.g. for WW II, where more data is available on Wikipedia (perhaps as some kind of bar on the right side in the closed state, as it may cross multiple time spans...)
7. More data in data.js; include sources.
8. Better adjust the globe positions, so they don't shift around, in particular around WW II
9. Blend the maps into each other at boundaries
10. Some kind of weighting, so more important events shou up first (no idea how to do this automatically yet)
11. Full touch support
12. Better automatic title rotation
13. More graceful degradation for small screens
14. Test on more browsers, in particular scroll wheel speed