dynamic timeline

[JonnyBlaze]

Hi Everyone,

I think this is the right place to ask, so I will and see what happens. Ok, for one of my clients, they want a dynamic timeline. Well at start doesn't have to be completly dynamic, but they would like a line going down the center of the page, with dates on both sides, so looks even. Then they would like a pop-up or comment to come up, when hovering over the dates. Anyone have any ideas? tutorials? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much in advance.
Jonny:)

[Rich]

A couple possible solutions (I'm sure more will be posted):

(1) Use Flash

(2) Prepare the timeline as a .gif image. Then, use an imagemap for the popups (which could be anchors, too).

Rich

[Hunkorama417]

I think a little DHTML for this could be pretty cool. http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex5/popinfo2.htm

[thudfactor]

When I had to do this I used the imagemap route & popups, and that worked fine. However...

Are the popups opening different browser windows? if they are, then you might want to find another solution if you can. Imagine your pointer at the lower left of the browser window. Now you want to scroll your browser page down a bit, so you mouse over the page to the scroll bar button to grab the bar. On your way, you mouse over three dates, and a couple of things could happen:

1) The events fire very quickly, and you suddenly have three more windows open you didn't intend to open
2) You open one popup window and lose focus of the window you're trying to scroll.

Either one is very annoying... and probably not worth the "cool!" value of automatically-opening popups... espeically since it will probably take Joe Non-Javascript-Coder four or five times to figure out what's happening.