Best format for timelines?

Which is your preferred timeline style?

  • The year-by-year format

    Votes: 10 22.2%
  • The series-of-articles format

    Votes: 5 11.1%
  • A considerable mix of the two

    Votes: 20 44.4%
  • I blame Thande for making this complicated

    Votes: 10 22.2%

  • Total voters
    45

Hnau

Banned
What is the best format for a timeline, in your opinion?

The poll is extremely limited, I know, and I'll go into that, but first, I believe there to be two schools of thought in presenting timelines. The first and more popular school of thought is to post a timeline as a year-by-year description. Wikipedia has something of an example here, however, I believe we all know what a year-by-year timeline looks like. The first part of The Cuban Missile War displays the penultimate year-by-year format, with excessive detail. The descriptions are actually often more detailed than the example because one must explain why one came to such a conclusion, instead of simply reporting what happened.

The second main school of thought is to present a timeline with a series of articles. One makes a title and then presents a description of a certain series of developments. This can be faux publications as in Decades of Darkness or without any backstory as to who is creating such articles. If the previous example was a year-by-year timeline, this example represents a series-of-articles timeline. Series-of-articles timelines sometimes incorporate more brief outlines of year-by-year explanations, and almost always feature out-of-context footnotes at the end to explain why such events are occurring. Also more common than in year-by-year formats are pictures and short stories. This style has, in my opinion, become more popular as of late, with promising new timelines such as Fuhrers Rush In, Warsaw Falls 1920, and others all following, surprisingly, very much the same format.

Which one of these two schools of thought is more popular, I wonder? Which one would you rather view and hold your attention? You can decide by participating in the poll, but there are some other attempts to gauge what is popular than just these basic formats.

What about maps? How often do you like to see a map? Every time there is a territorial change, or only once and a while. Which is better, a UCS map or a more unique one? I myself love the occasional detailed alternate history map, but prefer a new world map every single installment that features territorial changes, be it a year-by-year or series-of-articles timeline. I believe that it is much more courteous to post maps in a separate post than in the same that an installment is posted, for the good of those with smaller browsers.

An idea that was made popular by the Chaos Timeline was the coloring of sentences to identify to the reader how events are different than in OTL. This is best explained by the Chaos TL's creator, Max Sinister, "Red is for events that happened IOTL but not here, blue is for events that happened IOTL and ITTL, and black is for all events which happen differently ITTL."

I believe every reader wants to know at the start of a timeline exactly what the POD is, so that he or she can check the plausibility of a timeline as they are reading it, while the coloring of fonts takes this a step further, giving the reader a clear knowledge of the procession of divergence in a timeline.

Any other timeline accessories that I have not listed, please list yourselves, so that others can decide whether or not they like them. Please state your preferred timeline format, indicating year-by-year over series-of-articles or some other format, how frequent you like map updates, short stories/anecdotes, footnotes, etc. etc. Finally, I would like to thank you for your expected participation! Hopefully this will help timeline writers gauge what will earn them the largest fanbase.

-Hnau
 

Hnau

Banned
I find it interesting that no one has voted for the series-of-article format. It seems that when one posts timelines in the form of articles, year-by-year explanations are expected as well. Interesting.

Any views of the frequency of maps, footnotes, text coloring? I also noticed that some year-by-year timelines divide up all of the events into different regions, to make it easier for the reader to figure out what's going on where over the course of time. What do you think?
 
It probably depends on the time period. For things in the Medieval and ancient periods (4.6 billion years BC to ~1400s) I prefer the year-by-year format, but preferably with a lot of detail. Of course, since those timelines usually cover centuries of history, yearly events make it very eventful.

But for more modern times I prefer the a mix of the two, because the YBY format is easier to read but an occasional article helps too.

And my opinion on maps (and flags): you can never have enough of them in your timeline. NEVER. Even if you had six maps in a post, you still need more.
 
As has been said, in some instances, you almost have to rely on a basic timeline, but altogether the 'article' form is way superior to a timeline. You can just cram in so much more detail, so much more colour, etc in than you can in a basic TL.

I understand that some people just don't have the time for a huge project like Decades of Darkness - and some people don't have the time to read them - and that some basic TL's can be very good if they're creative, but I don't see any perusasive reason for favoring them in general as opposed to article-based ones. I find a lot of very basic TL's quite boring to be honest.
 
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maverick

Banned
We used to do the whole Year by Year, date by date thingy at OTL.com...

Anyhow, there's also the story format, like "Thaxted", (unless that's not a real TL...)...The articles and excerpts from Books thing (A Greater Britain, The No Spanish Civil War TL, Times of Trouble)
 
To read: YBY or other+YBY

To write: I prefer YBY

I like lots of flags, maps, and coats of arms in timelines. Map updates after extensive changes and/or a longish period of time. UCS map for reference at least. I don't mind just UCS but with effects and backgrounds.

Footnotes are only good with short posts.
 
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