HotStrip [params]

The Parameters Explained

Each of HotStrip's parameters is explained below, with reference to the clickable example code in the left frame: you can click a parameter from the example code to jump to its explanation, or simply read this page from top to toe. As you read, click the red references to other parameters to jump to them.

Most of HotStrip's parameters have a default setting which is mentioned below. If the default setting is the option you'd like to use in your own implementation, you can leave that parameter out of your HTML code.

Applet Width & Height
When setting up the applet width, bear in mind that visitors to your site may be using a lower monitor resolution than you are. I generally assume a resolution of 800 × 600, but this applet could be tough to use if some proportion of the narrow frame containing it gets swallowed up with a scrollbar. You may want to adjust your height setting to take this possibility into account. If your HotStrip frame should be accessible to Netscape users, make sure you check your frameset in that browser: it requires more space than Internet Explorer and doesn't support IE's TOPMARGIN/LEFTMARGIN body attributes.

For best results, narrow the width of the applet so that there's about half a centimetre of fresh air to the right of the last menu entry, and then place it between <CENTER> tags.

A height of around 50 is generally pretty good if you set the TypeMessage parameter to "yes". If you set it to "no", you can get away with as little as 25, depending on the size of your DisplayFont and whether your menu entries contain multiple lines.

Quick Tip: When setting up the applet dimensions, it's far easier if you use the BgColor parameter to temporarily set the applet background to a color that stands out from your page background. When you've set the dimensions and position to your liking, return the BgColor setting to the color you wanted.

BgColor
Hex triplet for the applet's background color. This will form the background to your menu entries. You'd normally choose the same color as that of your page's body-background. If you use the BgImage parameter to place a background GIF image with transparency behind the menu, the transparent color will be replaced by your BgColor. The default color for this parameter is 000000 (black).

BgImage
An optional background JPEG or GIF image to be placed above the BgColor and behind your menu entries. The value of this parameter will specify the image's filename (if it's in the same directory as the current HTML document) or the path to the image as an absolute or relative URL just as you'd enter into an HTML <IMG SRC=> tag. The image will be automatically scaled to fill the applet dimensions which might distort the image. For best results, choose or create an image that closely or exactly matches the dimensions of the applet.

TextColor
The color of the menu entry text when unfocussed (the mouse isn't over it). The default is 606060 (dark gray).

LightColor
The color of a menu entry when lit (focussed). The default is F0F0FF (a sort of satin white).

LockColor
The color of a menu entry when locked (clicked). The default is C00000 (mid red). If you choose a value for the HighlightedEntry parameter other than zero, the entry you choose will be shown in this color as soon as the applet starts.

LineColor
The color of the double lines that roll with the mouse. Both will always be the same color, and the default color is CC00FF (purple-ish). For the lines to be visible, the Lines parameter must not be set to 'No'.

TypeColor
The color of the font used to display the rolling message in the applet area (if you set the value of the TypeMessage parameter to 'yes'). The default is 00FF00 (lime). If you choose to have the message displayed in the status-bar instead, by setting TypeMessage to 'no', there's no need to remove this parameter - it'll just be ignored.

DisplayFont
A comma-delimited string giving the name, style and size of the font you want to use for the menu entries. The default settings are Dialog, in bold, at size 12, which would be written as Dialog,bold,12. Two important things to note: first, there must be no spaces in this entry; second, the three items must appear in the order name,style,size. Note that the style part of this setting can be plain, bold, italic or bolditalic, and these are not case-sensitive.

TypeFont
Another comma-delimited string that works in the same way as the DisplayFont above, giving the name, style and size of the font to be used for the scrolling message (provided the TypeMessage parameter is set to 'yes'). The default font is Helvetica,plain,9.

Spacing
A fixed pixel gap to be placed after each entry on the menu. When the mouse enters one of these spaces, no entry will be lit (though any selected entry will remain selected) and no message will be displayed. Clicking in one of these blank areas will do nothing. The default spacing is 20. A setting of "0" is quite legitimate, and will place the entries immediately one after the other. Note that there's a fixed indent of 7 pixels at the extreme left of the applet.

If any of your menu entries consists of more than one line, note that the spacing between entries is judged by the distance between the top line of each entry rather thanh the distance between the longest line.

Arrows
A simple, non-case-sensitive yes or no to whether the arrowheads should be displayed. The default setting is yes.

Lines
Another non-case-sensitive yes or no to choose whether the rolling lines should be displayed. The default setting is yes. Although you could make the lines 'invisible' by setting LineColor to match the BgColor, this is using unnecessary processing power since their position is still being calculated, and will probably not be effective if you're using a BgImage.

Sound
Specifies whether or not you'd like the applet to play sounds in response to mouse movement and clicks. A value of yes turns the sound option on, a value of no turns it off. Neither is case-sensitive. The default value is no, which means that you can also leave the Sound parameter out if you don't want to use sounds. The inclusion of this yes/no option allows you to use sounds on one instance of the applet without having to use it on all if you have several HotStrips on a page. With this parameter set to 'yes', you'll need to specify which sounds to use, via the two following parameters.

OverSound
Specifies the path (if necessary) and name of the Sun/NeXT format (.au) audio file to be played when the mouse passes over a menu entry. The location of the file is treated exactly as a URL: you might enter only a filename (if the file is in the current directory), a relative location (such as ../sounds/daftsound.au) or an absolute location (such as http://www.server.com/folder/subfolder/daftsound.au). See the note about Using Sounds, below.

ClickSound
Specifies the path (if necessary) and name of the audio file to be played when a menu entry is clicked. The same details apply to this parameter as apply to OverSound, of course. See the note about Using Sounds, below.

NOTE - Using Sounds: HotStrip is forgiving in its sound-support. If you set the Sound parameter to 'yes', and then forget to include one or both of the parameters above (or forget to upload the audio files!), HotStrip will continue quite happily (but silently). This means that if you choose to sound for only one of the two actions, you can simply remove the other parameter.

DefaultTarget
When using any menu applet you need to be able to choose different frame names for each link. This normally means that for every entry on the menu you need a URL and a Target parameter. However you'll want most of these links to open in one particular frame, meaning that almost all of those Target parameters would be identical. The DefaultTarget parameter gives you a way to leave out all those identical Target parameters. Simply enter the name of the frame or window into which most (or all) of the links should open; this frame-name will then be used by default for any link that doesn't have its own Target parameter.

This parameter's own default value is _top, so if you leave this parameter out, any URL that doesn't have a corresponding Target parameter will use _top.

HighlightedEntry
This is the only parameter that's required to be included in HotStrip (although you'll obviously need to include a few more to do anything useful). The usual way of using HotStrip is to place it in a small frame at the top or bottom of your screen to open pages into the remaining large frame. As your index.htm (or whatever) creates these two frames and places HotStrip in one, you can use this parameter to select an entry that should be highlighted initially to indicate which document is open in that large frame. The value for this parameter is a number from 0 to infinity. If you set it to a number corresponding with one of your entries, that entry will start selected; setting it to either 0 or to a number higher than the number of entries on your menu ensures that no entry will be highlighted on startup. Whatever you choose to do, the applet won't run unless this parameter is included with an integer as its value.

Location
You have two options here - top or bottom - according to where you're intending to put the applet. Choose top if it'll be placed in the top frame of your browser window, and choose bottom if it's going to be in the bottom frame. All the hard work is done for you - the arrowheads will point upwards if you select bottom, and everything will be aligned with the top of the applet, and vice versa if you select top. The default setting for this parameter is bottom. The value isn't case-sensitive.

UnlockOnExit
Two choices again, yes or no, and once again they're not case sensitive. The default is no. In the normal use of the applet, you'll probably want the menu entry that was clicked to remain colored with LockColor until another entry is clicked, whether the mouse moves out of the applet or not, indicating which page the visitor to your site is currently looking at. But on occasions, you might prefer that the LockColor is switched off when the mouse leaves the applet - particularly if you're using two HotStrips at the top and bottom of your window. In that case, set this value to yes, and the applet will 'forget' which entry was clicked as soon as the mouse leaves the applet, and won't remember when the mouse re-enters.

TypeMessage
Another yes or no option, not case sensitive. The default is yes, meaning that the Message you enter will be displayed in the applet area, rolling along with the mouse, and painted in TypeColor. Select no for this parameter, and the messages will instead be displayed in the status-bar. Selecting no means that a HotStrip can fit into a much narrower frame, but your messages won't be as noticable (unless you put your HotStrip in the bottom frame where the eye will probably notice the movement).

Entry1, Entry2, . . . Entryn
The text to appear on the menu for each entry. It can be as long or as short as you like, but bear in mind that the length of the text determines the width of the clickable area for that entry. You can widen this area by adding hard spaces after an entry (instances of  ) giving a bigger 'target' to click on. Remember that increasing the Spacing parameter just increases the width of the non-responsive space between entries.

To prevent entries becoming prohibitively long, you can wrap them onto up to three lines. To do this, simply type the pipe symbol (|) wherever you want a line break to appear. For example:

Click here|to visit|my homepage

would appear on the menu as:

Click here
to visit
my homepage

URL1, URL2, . . . URLn
The absolute or relative URL that each menu entry should link to when clicked. In fact, HotStrip can open up to four separate URLs when an entry is clicked. Therefore, along with the usual numerical addition that matches the URL parameter to its corresponding Entry number, the letters a, b, c and d are tagged onto the end. In the example parameters to the left, you can see that Entry1 links to three URLs, each of which opens in its own Target frame. There are two points to bear in mind about this. First, the URLs will be fetched one at a time (although they should appear almost simultaneous) in the abcd order. This leads to the second point: if one of those URLs will load a page over the top of the applet, the applet must stop running. Therefore, if you're trying to load 4 pages, using all four URL parameters, and your URL2b parameter is the one that loads over the applet, the URL2c and URL2d links won't work - the applet stops running before it can process the requests!

As an aid to testing, you can prefix your URLs with a dollar sign ($). You can then click the applet without error messages appearing or being linked elsewhere.

Target1, Target2, . . . Targetn
Allows you to specify a frame- or window-name into which each of the URL links should be opened. Once again, the number after 'Target' corresponds with an Entry number, and the a,b,c,d additions correspond with the URL parameters. If a URL parameter exists and has no corresponding Target parameter, the target used will be the DefaultTarget.

Remember that frame names are case-sensitive. If you're trying to make something open in a frame and your browser persists in opening a new window for it instead, check that the case and spelling of the name match in the Target parameter and in your HTML <frameset> tag.

Message1, Message2, . . . Messagen
A message to display in the browser's status-bar or in the applet area itself (depending on your setting of the TypeMessage parameter) when the mouse passes over the correspondingly-numbered Entry. If you don't include this parameter for a particular Entry, the message will default to the words Link to followed by the corresponding URL, showing where that entry links to. If you'd prefer that nothing appears in the status-bar at all, include the parameter with nothing between the double-quotes (for example, <param name=Message6 value="">).