Tabs in HTML Pages

[Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>]

I seem to recall that my first experience with Tabs in HTML pages was about 5 years ago when my neighbor gave a demonstration of a rich UI toolkit that his company was developing.  During the demo of tabbed pages a business partner turned to me and asked, "can your toolkit do that".  "Uhhhh, no", I replied.  I was unprepared for that.  My neighbor later sold his company to SCO, which is better known for their lawsuits against Microsoft, IBM, and Linux, than developing software, and the rich UI toolkit was shelved.

Since then I've used a couple different techniques to implement tabs in HTML pages, neither of which I'm totally pleased with.  I shouldn't feel too bad, though.  I can just point to the tabs in the IBM i HTTP Server *ADMIN interface and note that even IBM didn't get it right.

Yesterday I watched the training video at www.asp.net on Microsoft's tab implementation in their AJAX toolkit.  I skimmed over a rather lengthy blog on the subject, and the general consensus was that it was a good thing that Microsoft's implementation was open-source, because as it stood, there were a lot of requirements it didn't meet.

Early this morning, while in bed and partly awake but partly asleep, I
began making a mental note of a number of requirements for "tab"
implementations.  I think I came up with a fairly lengthly list.  I
hope I can remember it.

With that background, do members of this list have tab implementations that they're happy with?

Thanks,

Nathan.