Virtual News Client

The Virtual News Client is yet another way of displaying text on a web page. The News text is revealed to the viewer giving the appearance of being "typed". Once all the text in the file has been shown the file is reloaded.


The display has two parts: a Heading and a Message area. The heading is shown on the left with the message taking up the remaining area of the applet. The speed at which the message is shown - and for how long it is shown - are changed in the parameters set up in the HTML.

View the text file that controls the VNC example
Version 1.0 Features
  • You can specify colours for both heading and message.
  • Messages loaded from a text file are shown in order then re-loaded.
  • You can link to another page by clicking on the display area.

 
Text File values

There are eight values for each message in the text file. Each item is seperated by a comma. You can add comment lines if they start with a double forward slash //

Heading Text, Message Text, Link Path, Link Target, Heading [fgcolor, bgcolor], Message [fgcolor, bgcolor]

Text file parameters
Heading Text
Message Text
Link Full or local URL to another page
Target The  target frame for the link or specify a page. Default is _top
Heading text colour Hexadecimal, 6 digit value such as "FFFFFF" (white) or "FF0000" (red).

Default values are system colours - usually black and grey.
Heading background colour
Message text colour
Message background colour

Fonts

You can use any of the standard Java fonts. The names in brackets are the new Java 1.1 names although either should work for the moment. Careful with the correct capitalization!

  • TimesRoman
  • Helvetica
  • Courier
  • Symbol [Symbol]
  • Dialog

You can change the font style using BOLD, ITALIC or "BOLD ITALIC" styles. Don't forget inverted commas if the Value of a parameter is more than one word otherwise only the first word is used.

 
Parameter examples for SidNews Applet
 

<APPLET CODE="sidNews.class" ARCHIVE="sidArchive.jar" WIDTH=400 HEIGHT=20>

<PARAM NAME=font VALUE="Courier"> Java Font to use
<PARAM NAME=fontsize VALUE=16> Font size
<PARAM NAME=delay VALUE=4> Message reveal speed
<PARAM NAME=border VALUE=1> Border around each area
<PARAM NAME=margin VALUE=3> Margin around text
<PARAM NAME=appcolor VALUE="FFFFFF"> Applet background colour
<PARAM NAME=filename VALUE="file.txt"> Document file name
<PARAM NAME=style VALUE="bold italic"> bold, italic or "bold italic"
<PARAM NAME=pause VALUE="2000"> Pause between showing messages
</APPLET>