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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
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