![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So I am making a series of timelines on my website in order to get some kind of grasp on history. This damn thing has scope creeped into being 90% of the time I spend working on the site for ages now, so its really not surprising when I realized that I'll at minimum need another page with a whole different kind of timeline, this led to me needing to rant. Nay not just rant but have a series of rant tangents that I am trying to sort out here bc my brain started whistling like a teapot.
In the course of that I've accumulated a bunch of links to videos of historic events, images of artifacts, old radio shows, and other multimedia that originally I just kinda planned to shove in a little flag off to the side same as any other little "hey this happened then" note. This didn't really work as I am still making the darn things and getting the empires to stay in the right spot on the table is quite fun enough without having the flags jumping around like a picture in a word doc.
I really really should have started with making a huge table of empty cells and left a bunch of empty rows between anything thing that didn't happen within the same year. instead I am having to add rows and carefully increment every span and there are days I think of restarting it all using gantt chart software as if that wouldn't a) probably cost money b)look ugly as sin c) defeat the "I did it ah buh masef" aspect where this is at least supposed to teach me some CSS and history not how to use 1 kind of software with minimal transferable skills.
So I googled making timeline sites and thats where the rants started building up. Lets start with Timeline JS being recommended by every 3rd listicle:
I mean if I didn't care about learning to do it myself, a dozen small annoyances about the looks, and oh year being utterly at the mercy of someone taking the foundations of the whole thing out at any moment bc servers cost money, sites transfer hands etc, Knight labs has a timeline generator recommended on an absurd amount of sites. Seriously who goes "to make a timeline you could use paper then upload it as pictures, or use word then convert it to a webpage, or *dedicate ages to learning how to feeding your info to a black box that gives you an embed. Oh plus most of its example pages don't have the timelines on them anymore and the ones from knightlabs itself are full of dead media so god knows how long its still going to work at all. Looks like theres a zip if you don't want to use the CDN but while I might someday want to learn JSON it won't be for a bug ugly timeline in the wrong orientation (look I've developed a thing about vertical vs horizontal timelines, at least for my purposes where I need it to show the multiple spans of time like where something is on the geological timescale, within historical periods like post classical, high middles ages, various empires, and not just individual events) that recommends no more than 20 events on the TL. None of which would be more that a momentary "huh not for me, oh well" if it wasn't recommended so often as if it was some kind of gold standard like the ICS geological timescale, with no possible downsides noted, just a "look just copy the template in google docs, so easy!" which brings up a mini rant of its own I'll sum up with 1) its sheets 2) what makes you think that's not going the way of google reader with no warning?
I know, I know, this is primarily for kids who will never look at the assignment again once they get their grade (always bugged me they didn't make school assignments in a way you could use them more easily for review when the subject came up in later classes but I imagine that would be nightmare to get everyone on the same metaphorical page or wiki template) and news sites which really don't care after about a weeks worth of ad sales.
The other recs at least tend to be actual code snippets where you can see what they're doing but half of what they are doing is (at best) gilding the lily: overloading it with bells & whistles and only considering what you'd think would be obvious functionality questions like "can you put pictures in it? hows about video?" as an afterthought.
The events don't need to fly in from off screen! the timeline doesn't need to expand & contract as you scroll! if you were going to have each item take up the full screen any way why not make them separate pages so people don't have to load the whole thing bc they want to see one event? No! quit autoplaying! do not move me down the timeline automatically! the whole idea is its supposed to show you things and make you think so quit running people past it like a tour guide with another group in 10 minutes, if they wanted to watch a video, they'd already be on youtube! It slices, it dices, it can cut a tomato, but if you put in a picture the whole aesthetic is ruined? seriously? JS, CSS, SASS, HTML, & some random thing I never heard of to make the transitions (which it didn't need) look pretty, so I can have a plain text timeline that gives the viewer seizures. Oh but the rounded corners and gradients are totally worth adding another layer of work, bc good forbid anyone rewrite an article since HTML 5 came out, not like they linked it from main as if it was a current, undated resource instead of a blog post.
I should really not be surprised that after all that I ended up with the WC3 schools template which appears to use divs in ways that go against semantic HTML but looks it won't break if I put in a Youtube embed which, you know was the entire thing I needed it for in the first place. All that nonsense in the other ones, this is two kinds of divs (right, left), a bit of style so it looks good and if the screen is small they flop over to be on the same side of the actual line of the timeline. Only fun bit is going to be figuring out how to handle linking each event to the main timeline page with all the spans. On the plus side feeling validated in my decision to just do it in tables in the first place, seeing as most of the options barely work for showing time spans like the length of an empire and are only really for individual events. Oh and this will buy me some time before I decide if I need to break this timeline into at least 3 because its getting so thick.
In the course of that I've accumulated a bunch of links to videos of historic events, images of artifacts, old radio shows, and other multimedia that originally I just kinda planned to shove in a little flag off to the side same as any other little "hey this happened then" note. This didn't really work as I am still making the darn things and getting the empires to stay in the right spot on the table is quite fun enough without having the flags jumping around like a picture in a word doc.
I really really should have started with making a huge table of empty cells and left a bunch of empty rows between anything thing that didn't happen within the same year. instead I am having to add rows and carefully increment every span and there are days I think of restarting it all using gantt chart software as if that wouldn't a) probably cost money b)look ugly as sin c) defeat the "I did it ah buh masef" aspect where this is at least supposed to teach me some CSS and history not how to use 1 kind of software with minimal transferable skills.
So I googled making timeline sites and thats where the rants started building up. Lets start with Timeline JS being recommended by every 3rd listicle:
I mean if I didn't care about learning to do it myself, a dozen small annoyances about the looks, and oh year being utterly at the mercy of someone taking the foundations of the whole thing out at any moment bc servers cost money, sites transfer hands etc, Knight labs has a timeline generator recommended on an absurd amount of sites. Seriously who goes "to make a timeline you could use paper then upload it as pictures, or use word then convert it to a webpage, or *dedicate ages to learning how to feeding your info to a black box that gives you an embed. Oh plus most of its example pages don't have the timelines on them anymore and the ones from knightlabs itself are full of dead media so god knows how long its still going to work at all. Looks like theres a zip if you don't want to use the CDN but while I might someday want to learn JSON it won't be for a bug ugly timeline in the wrong orientation (look I've developed a thing about vertical vs horizontal timelines, at least for my purposes where I need it to show the multiple spans of time like where something is on the geological timescale, within historical periods like post classical, high middles ages, various empires, and not just individual events) that recommends no more than 20 events on the TL. None of which would be more that a momentary "huh not for me, oh well" if it wasn't recommended so often as if it was some kind of gold standard like the ICS geological timescale, with no possible downsides noted, just a "look just copy the template in google docs, so easy!" which brings up a mini rant of its own I'll sum up with 1) its sheets 2) what makes you think that's not going the way of google reader with no warning?
I know, I know, this is primarily for kids who will never look at the assignment again once they get their grade (always bugged me they didn't make school assignments in a way you could use them more easily for review when the subject came up in later classes but I imagine that would be nightmare to get everyone on the same metaphorical page or wiki template) and news sites which really don't care after about a weeks worth of ad sales.
The other recs at least tend to be actual code snippets where you can see what they're doing but half of what they are doing is (at best) gilding the lily: overloading it with bells & whistles and only considering what you'd think would be obvious functionality questions like "can you put pictures in it? hows about video?" as an afterthought.
The events don't need to fly in from off screen! the timeline doesn't need to expand & contract as you scroll! if you were going to have each item take up the full screen any way why not make them separate pages so people don't have to load the whole thing bc they want to see one event? No! quit autoplaying! do not move me down the timeline automatically! the whole idea is its supposed to show you things and make you think so quit running people past it like a tour guide with another group in 10 minutes, if they wanted to watch a video, they'd already be on youtube! It slices, it dices, it can cut a tomato, but if you put in a picture the whole aesthetic is ruined? seriously? JS, CSS, SASS, HTML, & some random thing I never heard of to make the transitions (which it didn't need) look pretty, so I can have a plain text timeline that gives the viewer seizures. Oh but the rounded corners and gradients are totally worth adding another layer of work, bc good forbid anyone rewrite an article since HTML 5 came out, not like they linked it from main as if it was a current, undated resource instead of a blog post.
I should really not be surprised that after all that I ended up with the WC3 schools template which appears to use divs in ways that go against semantic HTML but looks it won't break if I put in a Youtube embed which, you know was the entire thing I needed it for in the first place. All that nonsense in the other ones, this is two kinds of divs (right, left), a bit of style so it looks good and if the screen is small they flop over to be on the same side of the actual line of the timeline. Only fun bit is going to be figuring out how to handle linking each event to the main timeline page with all the spans. On the plus side feeling validated in my decision to just do it in tables in the first place, seeing as most of the options barely work for showing time spans like the length of an empire and are only really for individual events. Oh and this will buy me some time before I decide if I need to break this timeline into at least 3 because its getting so thick.
