MIT's Simile Timeline

MIT's Simile Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAX widget for visualizing temporal information. Here it is trying to visualize my travel.xml data (where I've been):

Unfortunately, this won't display correctly in an RSS reader. The file timeline-api.js must (annoyingly) be included within the 'head' tags of a HTML page. So, I modified Blogger's template and my own mirror. However, you will also notice that Blogger fails to load travel.xml (the timeline is empty), whereas my mirror, which is on the same server as travel.xml and simply gets its feed from Blogger, loads it correctly. Ugh!

JavaScript: 1997 vs 2008

After buying a very early issue of .net Magazine (1997?) that included the latest versions of both Internet Explorer (4.0?) and Netscape Navigator (4.0?) on a bonus CD, I wrote my very first lines of JavaScript. As far as I can remember, my script allowed a hyperlink to show/hide a block of text within the same page. The CD included many other DHTML examples, some of which needed separate code for the two browsers.

Recently, I've been using JavaScript to write something a little more complicated and I've been watching Douglas Crockford et al.'s JavaScript videos (JavaScript, The Theory of the DOM, Advanced JavaScript, Browser Wars, Quality, The Good Parts, The State of Ajax) to bring me up-to-date. JavaScript has changed alot: first-class functions, prototype-based inheritance, closures, variadic functions, etc. I have some catching up to do :-(