A List Apart: Comments on: Sliding Doors of CSS

Posted by: Ray

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

EXCELLENT! This is so good I plan to use it both to "sell" standards in our group and as a training exercise. ALA is back with avengence! Now for the bugs. The images change names about half way through the article, dropping the "norm_". Also, not really a bug but it would be nice if you made the transparent versions of the images available the way you did the originals near the top.

Posted by: Nathan

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

...that the paucity of recent CSS innovation as mentioned in the article -- [url="http://mezzoblue.com/"]Mr Shea[/url]'s [url="http://csszengarden.com/"]CSS Zen Garden[/url] being a notable exception -- has been due in part to ALA's absence on the web. Anybody else miss it? Great article, and welcome back!

Posted by: JR O

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Many thanks, Doug. Does this have anything to do with the Apple project? ;) You've elegantly solved something that has been driving me nuts lately. Thanks to you and ALA, as always for articles like this, which will surely contribute greatly to the standards community. Keep pushin'.

Posted by: Justin French

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Doug, you've managed to put into well refined code what has been flaoting around in my head for a while -- but there was NO WAY I would have been able to churn out such a tidy & refined block of code. I am truely inspired as always.

Posted by: Will

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Thanks for solving a problem that has vexed me to no end. No more squared-off tabs!

Posted by: berchman

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Every time you think that you are producing decent work and making headway something like this article comes along and humbles you in a most delightful way. The code is succinct, well written and forward thinking. Brilliant work. The best part of all of this is people like Douglas Bowman willing to share the genius of this work and people like Jeffery Zeldman creating this site as a resource. I know this article will help many is pushing the envelope of what's possible. Thanks much and cheers.

Posted by: Kevin W

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

The article shows superb attention to detail, but IMHO, at times takes it too far with the pixel-perfectness, bogging it down a bit. One thing it fails to address is hovering states (beyond text formatting). Because the images are split into two elements, to change them you must set the background of li:hover as well as a:hover. And what's the problem with using li:hover?

Posted by: Gabriel Radic

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

This is exactly what I was looking for! Thanks you!

Posted by: chris

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

I implemented this on my site. Looks great. Works pretty well, except I have a lot of absolute positioning going on and text-zooming can muck things up a bit... thank you Mr. Bowman. http://chrishiller.net

Posted by: LintHuman

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

This is marvellous stuff. It's great to see CSS slowly come of age with techniques like this, that can move us away from the flat colours and single pixel borders that were once embraced wholeheartedly but now bore us to death. All power to Doug's generous CSS elbow.

Posted by: mark rushworth

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

im working on this project using a design that for the time is close to another site the customer likes (it will change) i am using a single page to deliver reports which are accessed using display:block/none to hide the elements and wondered if anyone would give me a hand applying the Alist method into this design?

Posted by: Jason Lotito

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Well worth the wait for the new ALA. Simply amazing. Great stuff, and you can be rest assured, I will be stealing that CSS. =)

Posted by: RickIndy

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Good expansion on a technique that Eric wrote about here: http://www.complexspiral.com/publications/rounding-tabs/ Thanks

Posted by: Jean-Fran�ois Bastien

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Aren't floated elements supposed to be given an explicit width and height as per W3C specs? The technique is great.

Posted by: robert

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Hooray! I am glad ALA is back. Great beginnings and congrats to all. Another fine example of some of the hardest working ppl in the community. Now... if we could just get the browser(s) (IE!!) vendors to get CSS nailed so the hacks wouldn't be necessary.

Posted by: Widget

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Don't know what else to say. Likely, it's due to Firebird and not Doug's coding.

Posted by: Paul K

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Works fine over here using Firebird 0.6.1

Posted by: Ryan Mahoney

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

The examples of the effect are completely invisible, only see white space. Will check on Mozilla on other platforms. -r

Posted by: Ray Drainville

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

In Apple's Safari, the new tabs don't appear. At all--there's simply a blank space where the tabs are supposed to be. This is too bad, because this seems like a great technique--I wouldn't have minded a minor cosmetic problem, but having it go totally invisible makes this a no-go for me: that's not particularly accessible.

Posted by: twhid

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Anyone else missing the example image at the top of the article? I am, both on Zeldman and on ALA. A right click revealed it so it is there... Using Safari on Mac OS 10.2.6

Posted by: Sonia

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Nice work again Doug! As usual - moving the boundaries forward, and thanks for sharing! We use a sort of 'half' version for the nav on our site, but you've taken this to something really cool (that final example is really nice).

Posted by: Dean

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Nice article and technique but in Win IE 6 the tab backgrounds flash while mousing over. Looks nice and works as intended in Mozilla for me though.

Posted by: Richard Earney

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

This is a great article - well explained in great style by Douglas. :-> But... a more philosophical issue about tabs - are tabs a good User Interface Metaphor? Their real use is in A4 ring binders in a paper-based meme and what they say is that they are card section dividers with more paper underneath. In the web world they are dividers but there is nothing underneath - the information is on separate pages! I just wonder if the recent popularity of tabs as a navigation method isn't just a metaphor too far? BTW this isn't a rant - I am interested in people's views regards Richard

Posted by: Phunky

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

This is summat i myself have been messing with for a while, but how u have explained it will bring it to all the CSS starters which is great! The less we rely on javaScript for Image roll overs and stuff like that the better! Love the new design by the way and its great to have you all back :D

Posted by: Paul Nattress

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

I get the flashing in IE 5.5 too. Just playing the devil's advocate here, but if we used the standard method of displaying tabs (i.e. using only images) then won't screen readers read out the alt tags on the images? How is the sliding doors technique better for accessibility? Love the technique and will look to using it but wanted to ask the question for the benefit of others who may be thinking the same.

Posted by: Lance E. Leonard

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

The possibilities of rich interfaces created with css is becoming much more of a reality due to articles like this one. At our company, tabs are feared due to the either horrendous markup required to get something decent (tables, eeek!) or the flat nature of css tabs (until now!). I'm not only humbled but truly enlightened that the possibilities of rich css design are still in the very early stages. It just takes people like Doug to figure them out.

Posted by: Conan

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Great look; I am grateful it turned out different to the pinkified "coming-soon" teaser. ;) Richard Earney > What do you propose the "tabs" should be called? I won't go so far to say that "tab" is a standard name, but it seems to be used with a good deal of regularity, from preference-pages in desktop-applications to the technique described in this article. Semantically speaking I guess a more correct name would be an "unordered-list of anchors," but it's a bit of a mouthful. Maby a "list of links?" A "LOL?" ;)

Posted by: Douglas Bowman

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Ray (from the very first comment): the images change names at the point I switch from opaque-corner images to transparent images. In other words, "norm_right.gif" is the opaque version, "right.gif" is the new transparent version. All (8) images are available in the same directory. The "flashing" in IE/Win browsers is most likely due to the fact that you've turned off caching in preferences. Even without "a:hover" rules, IE has trouble holding a background image steady on anchors if you've specified "Every visit to the page" for temporary files. The latest versions of Safari, Mozilla, and Firebird *should not* have any problems with rendering any of these examples, according to all the browsers we've seen. I intentionally don't cover any philosophical or usability issues related to the use of tabs, so that the article stays focused on a technique for an already widely popular interface metaphor. Whether tabs are appropriate for any site is up to the team or individual responsible for that site. There are a few variations of the technique I didn't cover, for the sake of keeping the article as short as possible. Like using a unique ID for each list item, then another on the body element to pinpoint the current tab, instead of moving around id="current" from one list item to another. More complex image-changing rollovers would be possible with the same markup by using li:hover and a:hover to affect the background images too. But be wary of the fact that IE/Win currently does not support the :hover pseudo-class on any element other than an anchor. Thanks for the feedback so far. Keep it coming.

Posted by: ian burrett

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

been looking for a reason to redesign some stuff and this article might well be the daddy. fantastic looking site and excellent articles - as usual!

Posted by: Blakems

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Great article that shows there is no limits to what can be done with CSS. I would say that CSS is just starting to break into main stream. I enjoyed the detailed outline of the article. One thought is how would you be able to use something like pixy's rollover effect for tabs like these in the article

Posted by: Tom Dell'Aringa

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Ohhhh boyDougyouaregood... That's a real keeper! This is *exactly* the type of thinking that will sell standards. Great job. Tom

Posted by: Pursey

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Is there a reason why it flickers on hover? I'm using IE 6. Also, Is there an upside down version? Thanks, Purse.

Posted by: Eric

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

This is a great article, I can't wait to see what can be done based on this article. I am going to start right away on some mods.

Posted by: Marty Murtonen

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

I was looking or thinking about stuff on this line - and now you've done the work for me! thanks! (huge fan btw) Other than the nuisance flicker, the technique works very well. Now if only it could be done with svg.... Welcome back ALA, missed you. Keep up the good work.

Posted by: Hero A.

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

(Yes, that's my name. I blame my non-western parents. But I digress...) I love this technique. It would be great combined with the hover states of Dan Cederholm's CSS Image-Tab Rollovers. http://www.simplebits.com/archives/2003/09/30/accessible_imagetab_rollovers.html At the moment, other priorities keep me from testing it myself. C'est la vie.

Posted by: James Craig

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Thanks for this fine article, Doug. It's refreshing to see such a detail-oriented process outlined so thoroughly. Particularly beneficial was your explanation of the bottom border technique, a style I've struggled with on several occasions.

Posted by: ironchef

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Great article, Doug. Very thorough and detailed. I'm looking to create a similar effect (rounded corners) using header tags for articles. Does anyone know of a thorough guide on such an undertaking? I've been unsuccessful so far. Great to see ALA back with such relevant content!

Posted by: brandon

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Is humblingly a word? It should be. This article had me shaking my head at every step. I've been using CSS to design navigation for years, and never once thought of this brilliant idea. Not even close. It's the perfect answer to those who think pure CSS design always leads to a flat, boxy look. I had run out of demonstratable arguments. Welcome back ALA >>

Posted by: Dean

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Douglas - You are correct. Switching IE to not check the page for newer content every time removed the image flicker problem. Thanks for a great article.

Posted by: Berto

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

People generally try to click anywhere on the tab, not just the text. And without the underline, that makes it less obvious.

Posted by: Terence

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

I've already done something like this, but with a slightly different method (left and right are switched). http://filebox.vt.edu/users/tordona/tabs/tabs-rounded.html

Posted by: Mark Shiel

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

This is great! really it is awesome but it doesn't work in Internet Explorer 6 what is the point of using it? you can't start designing for Mozilla cause not enough people use it. Everytime I put my mouse over the tab the image disappears and leaves only the text. Works fine in Mozilla. Am I missing something because no one else mentioned this? Dang IE! Congrats to the new A List apart, awesome stuff!

Posted by: Trace Meek

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Kudos and thanks for a great article, and welcome back, ala. Look forward to more stretching of CSS to the limits and beyond, such as some of the things that Eric Meyer ( http://www.meyerweb.com/ ) does with negative-value margins. I'm sure it's already in the works.

Posted by: Jough Dempsey

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Doug, once again you not only provide an easy-to-understand tutorial on an advanced design/CSS subject, but your solution is elegant and stylish. CSS designs don't have to look like stacked blocks to work (not that I have anything but positive things to say about the blocky new ALA design ;)

Posted by: Tobias Michaelsen

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

This is great; simpler and more elegant than my current solution. The :hover image replacement problem in IE/Win can be solved - thou not too elegant - by nesting a span inside the anchor, and moveing the images in one tag-level. Example at: http://www.tjhm.dk/ala_tabs.html I don't see any problems in combining the images and using the pixy rollover methode (I'll propably try it out soon). Oh, and nice to have ALA back!

Posted by: Julian Russell

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Great stuff - it's really nice to follow through the intricacies of the approach - a great way to learn. I have a question/challenge though, and I hope it's not a stupid question. How can you center the tabs on the page (i.e. like www.apple.com).

Posted by: Matthew

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

It's great to find a site that cares about making standards work. Nice contribution by [url=http://www.alistapart.com/discuss/slidingdoors/5/#c5167]Tobias[/url] for the IE fix ;)

Posted by: Gavin jacobi

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

I have used a similar method but cheated on the selected tab. I nudged the tab down a pixel by using position:relative; top: 1px;. Yes it is cheap and I feel unclean -- but it worked.

Posted by: Brian

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

They look really nice, but as I think Berto has already pointed out, not only is the left side of the tab dead in IE6/Win, but also the right side, the top side, and the bottom side too -- everything but the text itself, which tangibly (mouse-wise) destroys the visual image of a clickable tab area. In NS7/Win only the left side's dead, so am guessing you may've done most of this in Mozilla without testing it in IE6. Anyway, whether it's a usability problem or not may be another issue, but don't you want to also mention in the article the defects in IE6/Win as well as those for IE5/Mac and NS/Mozilla? Or is it totally *uncool* now to still be developing, testing, and using such a popular browser as IE6/Win??

Posted by: Jason Ross

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

I just received SitePoint's HTML Utopia - Designing without tables. www.sitepoint.com/books/css1 ~excellent!!! I'm really impressed with the new mentality of the web dev community. Semantic Code is something I've been trying to accomplish on my own for the past year. These tutorials along with the afore mentioned book have gotten me there in two days. My Client is Stoked cause I got stoked, he's given me a whole WEEK(urgh) to convert over to a pure CSS SEO site. Zeldman you Rock! Dan Shafer you Rock! Douglas Bowman you Rock! Me- I'm stoked!

Posted by: john

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Very nice technique. I'm trying to build these images in Paint Shop and failing miserably - anyone have tips?

Posted by: Frank

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

First off I'd like to say what a brilliant article this is. Secondly, how would it be possible to adapt this to make scalable content holders. So, you'd have lovely rounded cornered boxes to hold text etc. How would you go about adding a rounded bottom to each tab? Keep up the great work, Frank.

Posted by: M�rcio d'�vila

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Simple, elegant and really amazing. This article presents a great solution for good looking graphical tabs only through smart exploring of HTML and CSS features. Congratulations, Doug!

Posted by: Andrew

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Having 'every visit to the page' selected in IE really is a showstopper.. i'm wondering if the default setting is 'never'?

Posted by: robert

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

This is exactly what I have spent all of today trying to get to work. Until reading this article, I couldn't tie it all together. I should've just played with iPod more and read this article. I missed you ALA.

Posted by: Gianluca

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Dear Doug, did you notice what a strange behaviour IE6 produces when you "hover" the tabs? Sort of border "flickering"? Other browsers are OK, but IE6 seems to render not properly... any suggestion? And BTW, welcome back guys ;)

Posted by: Mike Hudson

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Welcome back ALA. With an article like this that so well explains it's topic reflects on the competency of the author and the high standard of A List Apart. Well done Doug and ALA.

Posted by: shaggy

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Thanks, I have been working on the exact same thing but this is much cleaner. The only problem is the cursed IE bug that forces a reload of background images every time you mouseOver it!!??? There are several 'hacks' out there that claim to fix it but nothing works. Whoever figures this one out is the smartest kid on the block!

Posted by: Eckhard Rotte

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Hi, I� ve been playing around with this "sliding doors" - technique a few weeks ago. I stopped it because it doesn`t really work on Mac IE 5 - thanks for your solution. But in Mac IE 5.0 there's still a bug left - here's a screenshot: Does anybody have a solution for this problem? greets, E. * Maybe my english is horrible. I'm sorry for that.

Posted by: Eckhard Rotte

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Posted by: john

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

I get a flicker that occurs, where the background of the right side of the tab flickers as I enter the link, once I am hovered it works fine. This occurs in IE 6.0 on Win2k, and in examples 3 and on. In example 3, the left portion of the tab flickers, and in example 4 the right portion flickers. Obviously which one flickers is according to the layering. Very good article! Anyone else get this? p.s. of course it works fine in mozilla

Posted by: Peterman

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Truly a great article! I knew that background images could be used for e.g. rounded corners this way, and I suspected that more advanced things could be done with proper backgrounds, but I never dared hope it could look as great as examples 2+3 and still scale so perfectly. Paul Nattress ( http://www.alistapart.com/discuss/slidingdoors/3/#c5117 ) wrote: "Just playing the devil's advocate here, but if we used the standard method of displaying tabs (i.e. using only images) then won't screen readers read out the alt tags on the images? How is the sliding doors technique better for accessibility?" The text can be scaled. (A minor point is also that it downloads faster.) Accessibility isn't just about screen readers. Another benefit is that tabs can be added and changed with a few keystrokes in a text editor; no need for e.g. Photoshop to be used, or even installed on the machine you're updating from.

Posted by: Antony

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

The image flikering in IE6 only happens if you have the 'check for newer versions of stored pages' (Internet Properties/General/Tempoary Internet files/Settings) set to 'Every visit to the page'. This is not the default (the default is 'Auto'). But as web designers want to always see the newest version with out the cashed version getting in the way we all usually set it to this. (to reduce the likelyhood of seeing the cashed page just reduce the 'Tempoary Internet files folder to a tiny size (I have mine at 1MB).

Posted by: Manrilla

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Yes. Thank you. This has been a very helpful article. ALA is always filled-to-the-rim with great stuff.

Posted by: Tim

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Thanks so much for making this available. It's tres' cool. The version 2 style sheet will validate if you add an "s" to "San-Serif" to make "Sans-serif". Sorry, I don't mean to detract from a great article. Thank you again!

Posted by: Andy Smith

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Excellent article. I think the display problem with IE5/Mac (the one fixed in the article, not the one in Eckhard's comment) comes about because you're trying to do something that isn't intended to be possible in CSS2. Section 9.5 of the CSS2 spec says that a non-replaced floating element (ie one that isn't an image or object or something else with an intrinsic width) must have an explicit width. Section 10.3.5 says that if a non-replaced floating element has auto width specified, its computed width should be zero. So interpreting the spec strictly I think this means the tabs should disappear completely. However most browsers have decided on a 'shrink to fit' approach instead, which seems more useful. This has made it into the CSS 2.1 working draft, where section 10.3.5 describes how the shrink to fit width is calculated. Does this mean you should feel slightly impure and non-standards-compliant for using this technique? I guess it depends if you're willing to be a bit pragmatic about it and accept that the behaviour you're relying on is widespread enough to have made it into CSS 2.1. But if you want to be ultra-standards-compliant you should probably specify a width, maybe in ems if you want it to resize nicely.

Posted by: Martijn ten Napel

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Thank you for this excellent and insightful article (and what a comeback of ALA. The Eagles are nothing compared to it ;-) ). All the way through the article I was not thinking of tabs, but of all the other sliding doors that can be used for the flexible width content, and for that I think the "Bowman Sliding Doors" is going to be a significant one.

Posted by: Arthur!

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

I've been working on this for some time now, in an efford to replace my standard grey tabs with some eye-candy tabs. Thanks for sharing and congrats on the new issue of ALA.

Posted by: Stephen

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

In the interest of throwing out other "innovations": I implemented a similar, though not as glorious, method in adding a vertical slant to the left of the links "contact | directions | site map | home" at www.bigaustin.org. Demonstrates the variety of outcomes from this method, not just tabs. As I was reading, I asked myself "what about IE5/Mac?" and lo-and-behold, you encountered the same issue as I did =). Good work, much cleaner and truly more innovative than my humble slanted line.

Posted by: Douglas Bowman

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Andy Smith: First, let's make sure we're clear... there is no problem with this technique in IE5/Mac in general. 5.1 and 5.2 render it flawlessly. It's IE5.0/Mac which can't handle multiple nested floats very well. As I stated in the article, the upgrade to 5.1 fixes the many float bugs that existed in 5.0. The amount of people still using IE5.0/Mac is being pinched off to almost nothing as the 5.1 upgrade has been around forever, more people switch from OS9 to OSX, and Safari shifts into dominance on the Mac. Since the CSS 2.1 Working Draft makes corrections and clarifications to the many errors and vague statements from the original CSS2 Specification, no, I don't think there is a problem with omitting explicit widths for floated list items. In fact, specifying a width would defeat the purpose of allowing the tabs to expand dynamically with the text inside, no matter what it is, or how often it's changed or resized. Even if widths were specified in "ems", since most designs don't deal with monospaced fonts, widths of the tabs and the text inside them might not match up well, especially once the text is resized. Not to mention, every time you changed the text or added a new tab, you'd need to go back to the CSS repeatedly to modify specified widths.

Posted by: Paul Arzul

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

i don't think you need to worry douglas -- because you can use: width: auto; for things without intrinsic width (like floats). that should size things appropriately (i think). i'm rather more concerned about what this (wonderful) css tabs technique does to the semantics of a stylesheet -- since it's making them harder to read/decipher. i suppose we'll all be in for a serious tidyup come css3 borders: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-border/ - p

Posted by: roland

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

I found it easier to understand the markup than all that wordy stuff that led up to it. I also think the illustrations in the first quarter of the article would have benefitted from the use of an additional color to denote which layer is doing the overlapping. Regardless, it's nice to see ALA again.

Posted by: Seamus

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

I have been using this very nice trick for the past month on creating a capped look for the first and last list item by using :first-child and :last-child. I used it on a example to cap the bottom of the submenus. http://moronicbajebus.com/playground/cssplay/drop-down-llama-menu/ Note: It will not work in all browsers.

Posted by: Simon Boyle

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Arse! There was me getting ready to show off a similar trick on a site in about a month's time. The design's been held up in committee for about 6 weeks, but an id stripped demo is at http://homepage.mac.com/sboyle/demo/rollovers.html It suffers from an excessive

and flickers on Safari at the overlap point where both links are in a hover state, and hasn't been tested on IE 5 Windows yet. Nicely done.

Posted by: Scott Johnson

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

I'd been following all sorts of nice tabs based on unordered lists on the listomatic site recently, but this totally takes the cake. Doug, you've created some excellent tabs here. Congratulations. And welcome back ALA!

Posted by: Martijn ten Napel

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

In the article the display:block is set on the anchor element and not on the list element. If display:block is set on the list element and not on the anchor element IE5/Mac (the latest free version at least) does not stack the tabs vertically, but horizontally and in all other browsers it works as well. The IE5/Mac hack is not necessary then (I use the sams approach of floating list items for my website, so I experimented a little). Is there any objection to this approach?

Posted by: Arthur!

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

You can highlight the active tab without using the seperate .active class. There is a way to keep your markup the same on every indiv. page. [plug]See my website for information[/plug]

Posted by: BK

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

That was BEEEEUUUUTIFUL...I am going to use it on a project I am working on...my previous solution was clunky but this is clean....thank you!!! BK

Posted by: Christoph P�per

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

It's all nice and well, but for usability reasons you should avoid links to the current page, i.e. remove the href attribute:

Foo

Posted by: Sean Martell

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Amazing tutorial. Only one problem... is there a way to re-work this technique to allow for a centered tab system? The float:left really makes it hard to center this if you like having your menu at 100% width and centered. Any thoughts on a solution? Thanks!

Posted by: markku

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Very nice article, explains very well the possibilities of using mutiple background images, in a "layered" kind of way. Well done!

Posted by: Gena

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Interesting article, without a doubt, but it seems to ignore IE6 -- why's that? And there's no mention that only the text is clickable in IE6 (not rest of the tab). Is there a fix for this? Most of the tabs I see people using, both image-based and CSS ones make the whole image area interactive.

Posted by: rich

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

i'm happy to let IE6 users go through the ever so slightly steep learning curve required to click on the link rather than the tab. this is fine because the site i am using this on is a personal one, but in a business environment this may be a factor that would have to be seriously thought over. other than that, an excellent piece of coding. welcome back ala! oh btw nice hack from Tobias for rollovers. i've used it :)

Posted by: D.Reddish

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

This has achived an effect that i was trying to achive myself and got wrong in oh so many small ways. Its a lovely pice of work My own attempts sucumbed to horrible nasty hacks and gettarounds. This if very nice and much more tidy than my own implementation. Thank you its great to find such helpfull articles.

Posted by: Piero Fissore

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

I'm a 19 italian student and I love CSS design. This article is really cool 'cause now I've got new tools for my design. Bye bye from Piero, Italy.

Posted by: Brett Merkey

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

<> After getting two new computers in the same week, I can report that the default setting for IE6 in WinXP is "Automatically" -- which produces no flicker. Only Web developers, motivated by the lust to view their latest changes, would think to change this setting to break the cached behavior.

Posted by: Brian Andersen

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Nice work, I'll get to sliding.

Posted by: Jason Pearce

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

I'm so happy to have A List A Part back. Articles like this make many of us wish we could ":hover" over your shoulders for a day -- gleaming as much as we could. Thanks for all you offer.

Posted by: Markus

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

I also had that problem. For me it works fine when using a title-tag for the links. Problem fixed. :)

Posted by: brian

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Great solution, Markus... :thumbsup:

Posted by: Stephen

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Have tried in IE6, Firebird 0.7 and Opera 7 and I could not get images for the tabs, except for version 1 in Opera 7, which gives me the inactive tabs fine, but the active tab is not complete. Confused since everyone else says this rocks, and it sounds great....update - just refreshed my firebird and now it gives a working version 1, but still with broken active tab. You must be working on it...will check back. Cheers.

Posted by: Andrew

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

I'm with everyone else in heaping praise on this article and technique, I just want to ask a question though about the behaviour of the tabs when the window width is less than the total width of all five tabs. Using both IE6 and Firebird 0.61, examples 1 and 2 in the article make the tabs line up to the left, so if the window is only wide enough to fit in the Home, News and Products tab then the About and Contact tabs are aligned to the left on the next line. With examples 3 onwards the About tab displays directly below the Products tab and the Contact tab displays on a third line. This isn't so much a criticism as just an enquiry as to why this happens. I don't know enough about CSS to work it out for myself unfortunately.

Posted by: Joe Chong

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

I am going to try right align the tabs. Has anyone tried that?

Posted by: sandro

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

dear people, tabs are so last millenium. CSS is a silly hack. Don't use tables because they are obsolete (as if the browser will EVER stop recognizing tables. wake up!), yet use an UGLY hack to make this stuff work. Extraordinary.

Posted by: Martijn ten Napel

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

to sandro: If tabs are the right interface that is a great discussion. I don't know if they are soooo last millenium, but I'm not convinced I like them either. But saying CSS is nothing but an ugly hack and tables the best layout medium means either you are trolling around here (in which case your post better be deleted) or you show an extraordinary ignorance that is exemplarary of too many webguys who know one little trick and think that's the ultimate way of working. Read http://www.macromedia.com/newsletters/edge/october2003/index.html?sectionIndex=1&trackingid=OMN_AAJT to start with.

Posted by: sandro

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

to martijn: css is often hacked. the css in this example has a very prominent hack. other examples have other hacks. if you want to call that a troll, well... tables are the best layout medium. they are easy and known and automatically reflow. they will never disappear, you can quote me on that. they should be part of the standard, and any body that seeks to destroy something that is known and useful simply to conform to an abstraction like 'standards' is someone not to be trusted. which is most likely to happen? css hacks suddenly fail one day on a new browser release? tables stop being supported, thereby neutering, guessing, 10 billion websites or so? i wonder why amazon continues to use tables for their tabs. must be one trick ponies. You can go to uspto.gov and do a search for sandro pasquali. read through my patents. You will see in my work a commitment to advanced dynamism in websites. It is amazing that you send be to a 300 k flash file so i can read a 3 column layout (hint: everyone knows that's the wrong way to present text on the web) that celebrates css. there's so much humor there i'll just leave it for posterity. look, knock yourself out. use css if you like. i often use it for setting fonts and so on. but i offer that there is more power is learning javascript and manipulating the dom directly, via attributes, and even more power if you have the knowledge and desire to build XUL-ish layout manifests and have those parsed by a javascript-driven xml/http loader and local parser. you see, this lets you write functions that determine style attributes based on modal concerns, instead of dumb css templates that, let's hope!, get attached to the right documents. if you never want to progress beyond being a blog styler, stay with css. it's easy and fun.

Posted by: sanchez

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

sandro pasquali said: >>"You can go to uspto.gov and do a search for sandro pasquali." The search for sandro pasquali: http://www.firstgov.gov/fgsearch/index.jsp?fr=0&nr=20&de=detailed&mw0=sandro pasquali&mt0=phrase&ms0=must&in0=domain&dom0=www.uspto.gov&db=www&rn=1&parsed=true&act;.search=Submit The result: Your search did not return any documents. Please revise your search and try again.

Posted by: Ruth

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

To those people who earlier inquired about centering the tabs: I can't think of a way to do it without putting a wrapper

around the entire block of Doug Bowman's HTML code, and without specifying an exact width for at least one of the

's involved. If I'm wrong, someone please correct me; I'd really like there to be a simpler way to do this using CSS. The HTML would look something like

And the CSS would be something like #header-outerwrap { text-align:center; } #header-innerwrap { margin:0 auto 0 auto; text-align:left; text-align:center; width:XXXpx; } #header { /*Bowman's styles */ } Two wrapper

's are needed because 1. The original header

has been left-floated, and therefore needs at least one containing

to which centering can be applied. 2. IE/Win 5.X has a bug that causes elements with left and right margins of "auto" to not display as centered. To work around this, an extra div is needed...this centering hack is explained elsewhere online; do a google search if you don't know it already. I have only tested the above code in IE6/Win2K and FB0.7/Win2K; it works fine on both.

Posted by: Ruth

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

Note that this technique doesn't center the actual tabs; instead, it centers the div that the tabs are in. I haven't figured out how to center the tabs themselves; since they are left-floated, center-alignment is problematic.

Posted by: martin

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00

It would be fine to click the whole tab not just the text link.