Hello all - I was doing some work on an archaeology project recently that I thought might be of interest to this group. I was trying to use timeline to display dates in the range of 10s of thousands of years, and wanted to share what I found:
First, when dealing with very large date ranges, you run into the limits of the JavaScript Date object. Specifically, the Date object can only handle up to 8640000000000000 seconds before or after the Unix Epoch (Jan 1 1970); this gives lower and upper bounds of approximately 270,000 years - probably fine for archaeology, but less useful for geology. If you scroll the timeline so that a date beyond this boundary would be displayed, the band in question will go blank and die, presumably after encountering an invalid date. Second, I wanted to share my code for adding additional time intervals - in this case, I was adding 5,000-yr and 10,000-yr intervals. Unfortunately, the time interval code in SimileAjax.DateTime isn't very modular - there are a lot of switch statements that confine you to the standard set of intervals from DateTime.MILLISECOND to DateTime.MILLENNIUM (side note: when dealing with millennia, the first bug to look for is that you misspelled "millennium". I did this perhaps 10 times). You can see my addInterval() code here: http://www.nickrabinowitz.com/projects/timemap/opencontext/oc.js It's not the most beautiful code, because of the way I had to monkey- patch the SIMILE functions, but I thought it might be useful to someone. I think it should work for any arbitrary interval that's a multiple of one of the standard intervals, e.g. 75 seconds or whatever. Enjoy, and let me know what you think - -Nick --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SIMILE Widgets" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/simile-widgets?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
