How to get jQtree to read the initial tree from the HTML's source

[Kicychiny]

until now I've been using jQuery TreeView for my website's navigation menus, but now since the main navigation menu (on the left pane) has grown too large (Vim reports it takes 40869 bytes out of a typical page's 67054 bytes) I would like to make it less comprehensive in the raw HTML, and populate the remaining parts using AJAX calls that fetch JSON.However, jQuery Treeview cannot do that (and its author claims it is incomplete), so I'm looking into jqTree. jqTree seems to be able to handle AJAX stuff, but I don't understand from the documentation how I can get it to read an initial tree skeleton from some <ul><li> tags in the HTML, which I want to keep for people whose browsers don't support JavaScript or block it by default (I am using NoScript to blacklist all domains my default and am often irritated that sites don't even display correctly without JavaScript).I suppose I can write some jQuery code to traverse the <ul><li> structure recursively using jQuery's DOM support and construct some JSON out of it (with some amount of difficulty), but I'm wondering if it is a solved problem?Thanks in advance,