Can the GMT characters in the Event popup bubble be removed or modified?

Hi Roger,

This is indeed a long-standing bug in the MIT SIMILE widget we're using, but let's try and work around it... Note that all of these instructions assume that you have pulled a local copy of the MIT SIMILE widget per instructions in the module's README.txt, so that the widget's files are located in the directory modules/timeline/api/ under your website root.

I'll also use this opportunity to record the technical background information for posterity, in case someone wants to take a stab at permanently solving this bug and sending in a patch to the MIT folks. (In which case that someone might also want to know that my instructions refer, specifically, to revision 7189 of the MIT SIMILE Timeline code from their Subversion code repository at http://simile.mit.edu/repository/timeline/trunk/src/webapp/api.)

So, the event bubble timestamps are being output in XHTML tags like the following:

<div class="timeline-event-bubble-time">Fri, 22 Nov 1963 13:00:00 GMT</div>

As far as I can tell, this tag is being output by the file modules/timeline/api/scripts/sources.js, lines 416-419:

        var divTime = doc.createElement("div");
        this.fillTime(divTime, labeller);
        theme.event.bubble.timeStyler(divTime);
        elmt.appendChild(divTime);

That code in turn calls the file modules/timeline/api/scripts/labellers.js, lines 27-32, to output the actual timestamp itself:

Timeline.GregorianDateLabeller.prototype.labelPrecise = function(date) {
    return Timeline.DateTime.removeTimeZoneOffset(
        date,
        this._timeZone //+ (new Date().getTimezoneOffset() / 60)
    ).toUTCString();
};

It is herein that the problem lies. While I won't attempt a real fix just now, a workaround should be simple; just replace the line 31 with the following:

    ).toUTCString().replace(/GMT/, '');

This should get rid of the "GMT" postfix on the timestamps. (I haven't got the opportunity to test it out just now, though.) Substitute /GMT/ with /UTC/ if that's what your browser is showing as the time zone.

Should the above workaround fail for any reason, there is one more simple opportunity to get rid of the timestamp altogether. The CSS rules for the timestamp tags are located in modules/timeline/api/styles/events.css, lines 37-39:

.timeline-event-bubble-time {
    color: #aaa;
}

To wholly hide the timestamps from view, all you'd need to do is replace the above block with:

.timeline-event-bubble-time {
    display: none;
}

Hopefully one of these two workarounds will solve your immediate problem... and provided they do, good luck with your presentation and looking forward to hearing more about it afterwards :-)

I just applied this hack to a newer release of timeline (revision 8002). To get it to work I had to make the modification in the "bundle.js" file instead of labelers.js (which is included, but doesn't seem to be used).

I just noticed that this differs between platforms -- as mentioned in the original post Firefox says "GMT" while IE says "UTC". To suppress both add another .replace(). I want to strip the time portion entirely, so the line in bundle.js looks something like this:

).toUTCString().replace(/00:00:00 GMT/, '').replace(/00:00:00 UTC/, '');

closed because of inactivity.