A note from the MightyLinks developer:

I've emphasized ease-of-use, speed, and compactness in MightyLinks.
It was very important that the PARAMs work in a way which was 
familiar to HTML coders. It was also important that the finished 
class files be small and fast to download. 

For performance, I spent a great deal of time making sure that 
functions which affect painting were called as efficiently as 
possible. This meant avoiding unnessecary redraws which would 
cause noticable "flickering" when using image backgrounds. The 
catch here is that not all browsers repaint their applets equally.
More than once, I'd have something that was lean and mean in
Netscape, only to find that it didn't work consistently in IE.

Because there are only two or three class files which communicate
intimately with each other, I've left all of the properties and 
members public. As more classes are added or the originals are
reused, I will probably go back and change many things to 
private.

The loadImage() while-sleep loops exist because of a quirk in
IE 4 and 5. The loop insures that images are loaded one at a 
time instead of in parallel threads. It was found in testing
that IE 4/5 would tend to stop loading when several large images
were required (in this case, 8 images -- all about 20K). This 
resulted in buttons with only part of the image showing. Reducing
the number of parallel image-loading threads fixed the problem.

The nature of Free Software encourages changes and improvements by 
others. If you have suggestions or changes you would like to see 
incorporated into the official MightyLinks distribution, please 
send them to mightylinks@maiermedia.com.

Enjoy!
Edwin Maier