Re: Tabs in HTML Pages

[Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: "Guillermo Andrades
> I've used different tabs implementations, not 100% happy with none,
> in complex apps with a lot of fields the html+js ends to be really
> complex.

Right.  I'd like to keep the code simple.  In the past I've defined tabs 
with in-line HTML, applying CSS to table cells or buttons or hyperlinks 
to make them look something like tabs, but it has been somewhat 
unwieldy.  I think tabs are a good case for UI widget classes that have 
methods that can be evoked and properties set at run-time, instead of 
inline coding of HTML or other tags at design-time.

Inline HTML is particularly problematic because of browser 
inconsistencies.  Ever since Google release Chrome, I've been paying 
more attention to browser compatibility, and I'm often running 3-4 
different browsers concurrently when designing a UI.

Interestingly, Microsoft's AJAX toolkit still implements tabs with 
inline tags.  Not HTML tags, but tags which are more comparable to JSF 
tags, which generate code at runtime.

On the other hand, extjs implements tags with JS object literal 
notation, which I find a bit unwieldy, too.  I'd like to be able to 
create tabs with javascript injection after a page is loaded, in 
response to other events, for example.

Nathan.