The Lords of the Ring Timeline

The LOTR Project has recently added a mapped time-line of Tolkien's novel. They haven't used Google Maps but it is one of the best map time-lines I've seen, so I thought I'd have a go at seeing if I could create something similar with the Google Maps API.


Summer 2012 is my first stab. This attempt uses canvas to draw a line from the selected link in the map sidebar to the centre of the map.

One disadvantage with this approach is that canvas isn't supported by Internet Explorer so you need to use a modern browser such as Firefox or Chrome for the map to work. Another disadvantage is that the line is drawn to the centre of the map - therefore the map needs to be re-centred each time a link is fired.

Despite the disadvantages the map works reasonably well. If you wanted the map to work with Internet Explorer you could even use the explorercanvas library.