What I want to achieve is the following:
I want to have a tree-view list that will appear on the left side of the page, when an Item is expanded, it\'s items are loaded
ok, so I assume your list of items is an ul
To every item, you can add a class called closed, this clase would look like this in css:
.closed:before{content:'+';}
.opened:before{content:'-';}
Then ‹ith javascript, you togle those classes. You could also add other styles to these + and - signs in the css above, to give it a border and background color.