"is this possible?" Topic

Ok, so I learned to code HTML when you typed it by hand. So be nice to your elders.

I've been pondering about a way to allow people to find where a unit was at a given date. I was wondering if there is a way to either move some kind of "date slider" and either call up the town and country, or possibly link it to a flash thingy where it shows the location on a map.

This for people who go to a veteran's web site and wonder "where was uncle fred on 15 August 1944?" and it gives them a rough location.

You might be able to link a database into (onto?) Google Earth. I know it has been done for other projects

I was wondering if there is a way to either move some kind of "date slider" and either call up the town and country…

That shouldn't be difficult, though I don't think you can do the "slider" in plain HTML. The rest is just a database call.

Slider examples:

link

Definitely can do it but are you sure that is the proper control for the application?

Sliders are not good for specific value settings. So if someone really did want to know something about a specific date like in your example, your control would be difficult to use.

I can see a coolness to showing a timeline and letting people click on it but that is going to work better for general date ranges.

I'm not sure. This is an idea I had for a divisional association website. A common question is a relative asking where was the unit on X date?

So someone ends up going to poke thorugh some paper and gets back to them. SOmetimes the work is for someone who really could care less, but other times its really worth it (example- a fellow asked where his grandfather would have been on the day he was killed. That regt expert gave me the company HQ locations for the three days leading up to it, and I was able to send the guy a (period) map showing the spot (front slope of a hill just as mentioned in the unit log).

Now that's really too much detail, but I could probably generate a database with info on each day as to where the Division was, and where each Regiment was. The question is how can this be displayed?

I assume people would be happy just typing a date into a box, selecting the regiment, and getting a box that said "Simonskall, Germany" – which I gather you could probably fancy it up to link to google earth and display the current ara map.