I want to \"paint\" the tree on screen using CSS and HTML and not represent it in any way or data structure ...
A very simple way of creating a tree-like structure with HTML and CSS is nesting Then you can add a A JSFiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/VxRmc/ I've added percentage widths to each div. You can calculate widths if you know how many childs a node has. Or you can use fixed widths... Yeah, it's not a beautiful tree, but it can't be simpler.
Each div
represents a node, and can have multiple nodes inside:
margin-top
to all divs, so that they appear under its parent div.