How it works

A board is your comparison — a title, an optional overall date range, and a set of lanes. Each lane is a person, an organization, an era, or any thread you want to place on the timeline.

Every lane is marked protagonist — the subjects you’re focused on — or context — the backdrop around them. You can fill a lane’s entries four ways:

• By hand. Type each entry into the grid — dates parse naturally (1949, c. 1976, late 1973).
• In bulk. Paste rows from a spreadsheet — tab or comma-separated — and the grid fills itself in, up to five columns (date, end, label, description, source).
• From the library. Drop in a ready-made context lane — US Presidents, Popes, Chief Justices, Nobel laureates, and more — with events already dated and sourced.
• Live from Wikidata. Search a person to add their lifespan, or search an office to add its full run of holders — every US president, each with dates.

Recolor or reorder lanes any time; each lane keeps a distinct color and shape marker so it stays tellable-apart in grayscale or for color-blind readers.

Every board has a Compare tab that draws all its lanes on a single, date-scaled timeline. Zoom in and out, fit to the data, pan by dragging, and click a lane’s gutter label to focus it. A text-table equivalent of the same data is always available, one click away.

Every entry can carry a source — a link or a plain citation — shown in its tooltip and the text-table. Imported Wikidata lanes link back to their source automatically, so the comparison stays honest about where its facts come from.

History is rarely precise to the day. Stratatouille figures out how precise a date is — year, decade, circa, or exact — late 1973and renders it with an honest amount of visual softness, instead of pretending to a precision the historical record doesn’t support.

Type dates the way you’d naturally write them:

• 1949 — a plain year
• 1980s — a decade
• c. 1976 — circa, for an approximate year
• Dec 1993 — a month and year
• 2 Dec 1993 — an exact day
• late 1973 — a qualified year (early/mid/late)

Stratatouille infers the precision and rendersit accordingly — a circadate gets the softest fade, when a decadegets a broad, gentle band. This is about how sure the historical record is, not just what you type.

The comparison view is built to WCAG 2.1 AA. It never relies on color alone — every lane pairs a hue with a distinct shape marker — and a screen-reader text-table equivalent of the visual is always available. Read the full Accessibility Statement.

Export the current comparison as a PNG for slides and docs, an SVG crisp at any size, or a JSON snapshot of the underlying data. Or publish the board as an unlisted, read-only link that anyone can view without an account.