Web Tour

This tiny applet is meant to be 'hidden' on a webpage (give it a width and height of 1). There is no graphical part to it, but it may be used to automatically spawn new webpages at specific times and specific browser frames. The simplest implementation may be used to just 'jump the user' to another page like a META tag, or the WebTour applet may sit in a separate browser frame and show new pages in other frames. The 'web tour' is automatic and does not allow any user interaction. The example below will begin a web tour of some of Eric Harshbarger's sites in a separate browser frame. The tour will begin six seconds (6000 milliseconds) after the applet loads, and will advance through the pages every 20 seconds.

Downloading

The applet may be downloaded for free by clicking on the TAR-file link below (read the FAQ if you're not sure what to do with a TAR file). The FAQ also has step by step instructions on how to embed an applet into your own webpage.

WebTour1.tar

Once unTARed, you should find the following classes (plus a '.jar' file if you want to use the archive= attribute in the <applet> tag):

Parameters

Below are descriptions of all the parameters you may use to customize the applets to your webpages. Be sure to enclose any parameters that contain white space in double-quotation marks. Most parameters have default values in case you do not specify your own values, but the first two parameters (AUTHOR and COPYRIGHT) are necessary. If you are not sure how to incorporate an applet into a webpage (with its parameter names and values), looks at the source of this webpage and the applet embedded for an example, or read the FAQ page.

  • AUTHOR: This parameter must appear exactly as follows: 
    <param name=AUTHOR value="Eric Harshbarger, http://www.ericharshbarger.org">

  • COPYRIGHT: This parameter must appear exactly as follows: 
    <param name=COPYRIGHT value="WebTour applet, Copyright 1999, Eric Harshbarger">

  • TOURFILE: This parameter points to a plain text file that is formatted in such a way as to tell the applet what webpages make up the 'tour'. Each line of the file should be of the form: 
    url_of_webpage       browser_target_frame       time_in_milliseconds
    The applet will read in the TOURFILE and after waiting an amount equals to FIRST.PAUSE, it will proceed to spawn the webpage in the first line in the named browser frame. That page will remain for a time as indicated by the last argument in the line of information. After that time, the applet will spawn the next page using the information in the second line (or stop if there are no more lines).

    The URL info is required for each line, but the target_frame and time info is optional. If omitted, each will default to a value equal to the info in the previos line (or, if omiited from the first line in the file, the defaults are '_self' and FIRST.PAUSE, respectively). Note that in order to keep things straight, if you want a time indicator you MUST include frame information as a place holder even if the targeted frame is the small as in the previous line. The example applet above uses this TOURFILE.

  • FIRST.PAUSE: This is the number of milliseconds the applet waits after loading before starting the 'web tour' by launching the first webpage from the TOURFILE. The default is 5000 (5 seconds).

  • LOOP: If 'true', when the applet runs out of lines from the TOURFILE, it will recycle back to the beginning and restart the web tour. The default is 'false' which means that after the final line from TOURFILE, the applet stops the tour.


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