Hi Robin,

There are two issues:
1) How to encode your story's dates using the Javascript date object
2) How to teach the labeller software to transform the encoded date to an 
English text string.

You can do both using Timeline, but you will need to write the two parts listed 
above. This has been discussed on this mailing list before, the person was 
asking about encoding "dates" as microseconds because they needed a large range 
of data; I sent a couple of emails about it.

Depending on your cleverness in encoding your story's dates using the Date 
object, you can have any number of "days," "months," "years," etc. 
But you will need to encode the information yourself. You can directly set the 
Date object values by using the Javascript Date object method discussed in the 
wiki. If you want to parse your "dates" as ISO8601 then you will be limited to 
"years" that have 12 "months". 

Hope this helped,

Larry




________________________________
From: Robin McEntire <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday, March 17, 2009 9:05:42 PM
Subject: Re: Timeline non-Gregorian calendar


thanks, guys.  I think I should have been more specific.  A bit more 
detail may help clarify what I'm after.

So, let's say this fictitious story has years, which have months, which 
have days.  So, an ISO8601 format is valid wrt the elements that make up 
the format (oh, and hours and seconds still apply in this story).

However, even though we can express dates in terms of years, months, 
days, hours, minutes and seconds, there may be some anomalies.  For example;

1) The months may not be named as we name them.  January, the first 
month of the year in this storyline, is called 'Foo',  the second month 
is called 'Bar', etc.

2) The number of months in a year may not be 12.  There may be 12 months 
of 30 days plus one month of 5 days, or maybe the year is not 365 days.  
And the number of days in months may not be as they are in the Gregorian 
calendar.

3) The number of years in the current time period (or any for that 
matter), may be > 9999

Maybe I'm making a problem where there isn't one, but it seems to me 
that if I use an ISO8601 format that;
- a parser can understand the format (a good thing)
- but a parser may not be able to validate the content, because, for 
example, the number of months does not match the Gregorian cycle
- the display of dates will not be correct, because it will call the 
first month of the year 'January', rather than 'Car', and it may have a 
problem recognizing that the month 'Cdr' actually has 73 days in it

Hope this helps clarify what I'm after.  As I said, maybe this is just 
dirt simple and I'm not seeing it.

thanks, again,
  robin


David Huynh wrote:
> Robin McEntire wrote:
>  
>> Timeline is a great project, guys!  Well done (and love Exhibit, too)!
>>
>> I have a history for a fiction story that takes place in a world that 
>> does not use the Gregorian Calendar, and I'd like to display that 
>> history using Timeline.  I'm wondering if anyone has implemented 
>> something like this.  If so, any pointers would be appreciated.
>>  
>>    
> You could define a new kind of time unit, such as "million of years" in 
> this example
>
>    http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/examples/dinosaurs/dinosaurs.html
>
> David
>
>
> >
>
>  


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