[whatwg] Suggestion: Implementation of Tabbed Forms

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, fantasai wrote:
>
> I don't see why you're calling these sections "mutually exclusive".
> The /presentation/ of each section excludes the presentation of other
> sections, but I've yet to see an example of how the sections are
> themselves mutually exclusive.

The example I originally had in mind when proposing the concept of
mutually exclusive sections was that of a game which had three "screens",
the first is a login page, the second is a game board view, and the third
is a high scores view. The three are mutually exclusive.

I've seen wizard interfaces where the views are mutually exclusive too.

I agree that a tabbed interface is probably semantically just a group of
fieldsets with a different presentation. I'm not sure how we should do
tabs though. I really dislike making authors re-use existing elements with
just different attributes, a la:

   <fieldset role="tab">
    <legend> ... </legend>
    <p>...</p>
   </fieldset>
   <fieldset role="tab">
    <legend> ... </legend>
    <p>...</p>
   </fieldset>

...and I'm not sure it's purely presentational, to the point of just being
a CSS rule:

   fieldset { display: tab; }

I'll think about this some more though.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'