in reply to representing a tree graphically...

I've done some code that does exactly that for a client. The same client that I wrote my most recent Linux Mag column article about, although the part that I wrote up in that past article wasn't the HTML part. But, there's a good chance that I'll write it up for this month, so if you can wait a few days, I'll give you some great code that does that (and even deals with what you would have as "symlinks").

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker