iTree
Documentation
This page covers the basics and the free version.
1. Inserting the applet in your HTML page.
When putting applets into web pages, it's best to use a
direct HTML code editor that allows you to view and edit
the HTML directly. Frontpage is not a good idea. A Windows
notepad is better than Frontpage.
Start off by copying and pasting the following into
your HTML at the point where you want the applet to display.
<applet code="it3free.class" width=140 height=200>
<param name=copyright value="Image Intelligence Ltd. 1998 (www.imint.com)">
<param name=colourscheme value=7>
<param name=escapepage value="non_java_menu.htm">
</applet >
You can enter whatever height and width you wish. If you have
a commercial version not called "it3free.class", change the file
name of the applet as appropriate.
The copyright information
must be entered exactly as above - otherwise the applet won't work.
In the free version there are just two further parameters.
The colourscheme parameter
takes values from 0 to 7, where 0 to 6 are pre-defined
colour schemes and 7 is a random selection from schemes
1 to 6. The same colour schemes can be seen if you click
on the colour button in the top right-hand corner of the
applet.
The escapepage parameter must be given the name
of your non-java menu.
There are no further ways to change the appearance of the
free version of this applet, and the commercial versions
permit only additional colour and scroll width changes. If
you want to have greater control over applet appearance,
you need an iSlide menu system.
2. Writing your own menu
The menu content is kept in a separate text file called
"menu.txt". This file must be in the same directory as
the applet files. The format of the file is a standard
format used by almost all our applets. We wrote a special
tool for automatically creating and editing such files -
it is the "website indexing system" belonging to
iSlide Pro Studio, and can be downloaded free of
charge from our website. If you like, however, you can also
just write the file with a text editor. You can take a look
at an existing menu file here, or use
the following description.
The index file consists of one line for each entry
in the menu. Empty lines are ignored; comments can be
inserted after // (double slash) which the applet ignores.
A valid line must have the following format:
"TEXT:My Text" "1" "" "LINK:myfile.htm,myFrame" "[Message]"
This would be the equivalent of the HTML:
<A HREF="myfile.htm" TARGET="myFrame">My Text</A>
In other words, it displays the text "My Text", hyperlinks it
to "myfile.htm", and loads the page into a frame called
"myFrame" when clicked. In addition, a message to appear in the
browser status bar can be entered between the final set of
inverted commas. If you want to know more about what kind of
links can be entered, this page
contains a lot of information.
Following "TEXT:My Text"
in the example above, there are two further entries reading
"1" "".
The first of these is the hierarchy marker, and tells the applet how deeply
to indent the entry. Creating a sub-menu
is easy - you just put all the sub-menu contents after the folder
entry line in the index file, and make sure their hierarchy marker
is 1 greater than the hierarchy marker of the folder entry.
Following the hierarchy marker are a couple of "". In
this applet these markers have no function, but they MUST be entered or
the applet will not work. They are there because these index files must be
compatible with all our other menu applets.
When writing an index manually, the most frequent mistake is
to put the wrong number of ". Count them, or use the editing tool
mentioned above.
And finally: remember that the free applet won't take more than
about 50 items in the index; the commercial version (iTree Mini Menu) will do up
about 100; if you want a menu that does
big sites, iTree Express handles infinitely sized index systems.
3. Line wrapping
This applet will automatically wrap long entries
over as many lines as needed. If you want to force
a line-break at a particular point, you can do this
by inserting a " § " (space - paragraph symbol - space)
into the entry text.
4. Uploading it all to your website
You must upload three things to the same directory:
it3free.class (upload in binary mode)
menu.txt (upload in ascii mode)
the HTML file that uses the applet
A frequent mistake is to put things in the wrong place or give them
incorrect names - then the files can't find each other.
When trying out stuff on your website or locally, you should
realise that changes while developing will not always appear if you just
reload the page. You must super-reload (SHIFT-reload under
Netscape and CTRL-reload under Microsoft).
5. Additional Help
Remember that with many thousands of people using our free
software, we cannot both provide individual help and develop
more free software for you. Time has its limits. We offer
a great number of FAQ's on this site, covering things like
frames usage, script usage, bug-finding, etc. Please use the
documentations and FAQ's fully before contacting us for help.
Most help requests we receive are from people who haven't
read the documentation and FAQ's properly.
Back to the iTree applet page
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