Preceden creator here; thank you for the mention.

Fun fact: Preceden was launched on HN almost four years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1114834 :)

JS has some OK solutions these days (yours was probably very early), but print and other formats can be a hassle.

For example, I spent some time looking at TeX solutions for timelines a few years back and found there were none with support for decent multi-page rendering, etc.

I spent a few hours over the last few days finally improving https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Buddhist_traditions_t... too.

Conclusion: everyone loves a good timeline. Spatial reasoning is a great way to simplify huge collections of dates and times to filter for visual trends. Unfortunately, there's really few good tools. There probably needs to be a standard markup language in this space.