Designing custom items

Before you proceed be sure you already read overall concepts and know what I mean by icon/shape and content visual components of an item. For each of the visual components You can provide up to four stages. The four stages are: collapsed normal, collapsed highlighted, expanded normal, expanded highlighted (highlighted items are those which mouse currently stands over). You put URL's to the images for this stages in your tree file. Read tree file format if you don't know how. If you specify less than four images, applet make a best guess which images to reproduce for missing stages. For leaf items (which don't have subitems) you never specify more than two stages anyway (because they can't be in an expanded state). One thing you shall take care of: size of the images provided should be the same within same visual component of an item. Icon/shape may differ in size from content, and each item can have it's own size. But within same component of an item, images should have same dimensions. Not following this rule may result in visual glitches.

SiteBrowser allows you to have custom items where only icons are customized. For example you can specify explorer-like icons for your items this way, without customizing item content.

SiteBrowser allows you to have custom content and standard internally rendered icons/shapes. What's it useful for? For example you don't like fonts, supported by the applet (actually those supported by JDK 1.1). Then you prepare transparent gifs where you draw your text in any paint program with the font you prefer and with two colors for two stages (active and normal). This way you get usual SiteBrowser feel and look with your own so liked font.

SiteBrowser also allow you completely custom items, where either icon and content are your custom images. Other way to have a completely custom item, is to have just custom content with no icon.

With this basic support you can design your browsing as cool as your imagination and painting skills are. Look at examples of using SiteBrowser with custom items.

Last modified 5 Apr 2000  (c) by Mark Novozhilov <lordmark@lordmark.de>