A List Apart: Comments on: Sliding Doors of CSS, Part II

Posted by: Michael Ward

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

A fantastic article, and it caters for all levels of hacks. Some people don't want to add muck mark-up, others don't mind a little. I bow down to this ground-breaking CSS expert!!

Posted by: David

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

A great technique - I'm sure we'll see it in use in the future :)

Posted by: Ray

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

If only I had seen this series of articles before my last submission to Dave's Garden... Thanks for sharing :)

Posted by: Mike

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

...to what CSS has to offer, Doug! Not to mention great work on the graphics for the article, Outstanding stuff. It would be neat to work in something like Kalsey's Tabs, with the secondary tabs built in as nested lists...Hmm...

Posted by: Michael Landis

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

This has been a great read, definitely a useful tutorial on advanced tab navigation. One thing I'm wondering about is the use of classes/ids to identify the current navigation section. Instead of

[url="tab1.html"]Current Tab[/url]

it seems like it would be helpful to provide some highlighting for the stylistically challenged:

[strong][url="tab1.html"]Current Tab[/url][/strong]

Thoughts? Comments?

Posted by: Douglas Bowman

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

Michael: It would certainly be possible to insert in addition to (or in place of) the anchor. This is something I do for the current navigation on Stopdesign. It seems appropriate to emphasize the current tab text with , especially for cases where users see an unstyled (or stripped down) version in a text-only browser, or a screen reader which might pronounce emhphasized text differently. It would just mean adding a few additional selectors to the style sheet to "conditionalize" a little differently. Because some of the styling is applied to the list item, I think you'd still need to have some additional way of identifying the "current" list item, whether that be through the original id="current" method from Part I, or the alternative method from Part II. If all the styles are moved inward one element (as in Example 8a) you could get away without using any IDs.

Posted by: Mark Shiel

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
The tab still disappears on mouseover with IE 6, in-fact it's a bit worse now. Sometimes the original tab image doesn't reappear and your left with nothing but text. My settings are on "auto" like the article says.

Posted by: apartness

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
In our tests here in IE6/Win it works exactly as described in the article. Not that that helps you or eases your pain. Perhaps another preference setting is to blame. Browsers! Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.

Posted by: Rajeev Sharma

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
All of your examples seem to be flickerless on IE6/Win98SE, but on my (home) IE6/XP computer, they flicker with any cache setting. I'm using IE 6 XP ("Gold") with SP1. The exact version is 6.0.2800.1106.xpsp2.030422-1633. It has all the updates I've found applied to it. Is this a flaw in your method, or an obscure bug that has only ever happened to me?

Posted by: Andy Triboletti

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
This is some really beautiful stuff. I was really impressed with the first, and honestly didn't see how it could get much better, but you definitely proved me wrong.

Posted by: elan

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
IE6/XP Same 6.0.2800.1106.xpsp2.030422-1633 version as reported above, same flickery behavior.

Posted by: Stephen Taylor

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
An excellent experiment in the power of css.

Posted by: Martijn ten Napel

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I wonder if the IE5/Mac hack is needed. If you add a display:block to the li definition, IE5/Mac lines up nicecly. To see this I have modified the example7 file: http://www.xs4all.nl/~mosm/Blogtest/slidingdoors_alternative.html Any reason not to do this?

Posted by: Andreas

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Martijn, I just had a look at your example with Opera 7.11/linux and all tabs are sitting on the left on top of each other without any background grafics. Andreas

Posted by: Andreas

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Both articles are very inspiring and very succinctly written. I enjoyed reading them and took home a lot of new insights. Thanks, Doug. Andreas

Posted by: Martijn ten Napel

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Andreas: I have checked on Opera 6.03 on my Mac and a fresh copy of Opera 7 on Win98, but they both make a mess of both the CSS in the article and my own example. Tweaking a local copy of a HTML file and a stylesheet and reloading in Opera 7 did not show any difference, even not when emptying the cache and restarting Opera. Even more interesting, this website (A List Apart) uses the same technique for its top menu, but not the IE/Mac hack and it still works. Can anyone shed a light on this? I like my stylesheets with as less hacks as possible and it seems there are more roads leading to Rome when using list-items for a menu and marking them up with CSS to align them horizontally.

Posted by: dusoft

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I am using Mozilla, but tested it on IE 6 under Win2k and no flickering occurs when the cache is set to auto. However I prefer using every time check, so it's less useful for this option (doesn't look good). Regardless of this IE bug, this article is way to go! Thanks for sharing your tips.

Posted by: Micha�l Guitton

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Congratulations Doug for refining the sliding doors even further; however I'd like to print those 2 articles for back reference w/o the menubar and sidebar widgets. A shame that ALA doesn't have a print style sheet ready yet.

Posted by: Jeroen Coumans

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Very nice! I've been experimenting with tabs too and this will certainly come in handy. One caveat I've noticed though, is when you have a large tab row (try making the fonts extremely large in one of the examples). Depending on the browser, the tabs are then stacked in different rows or wider then the content. The only way around that seems to be limiting the width of the tab row to the width of the content below it, which may not always be possible.

Posted by: std

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Nice article, congratulation. While trying out with IE6/XP (Version:6.0.2800.1106.xpsp2.030422-1633) the example 8a functioned perfectly. However, with the examples 9 to 10a was not to see any hover effect, up to the changing of the font color.

Posted by: std

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Sorry, didn't realize that only example 8a has the additional spans.

Posted by: Rajeev Sharma

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Wow, I guess we've found a really wierd bug in IE6/XP. I tried it with another browser of the exact same version (6.0.2800.1106.xpsp2.030422-1633), and the flicker did not occur. The browser's cache setting is set to "Automatically". Maybe it has something to do with a plugin. I'll test it later when I get home. Here's a list of my plugins: -Google Searchbar (the newest one) -Download Accelerator Plus (toolbar not showing) -Yahoo! Companion (newest version) -Some XML/XSLT extension I downloaded of the net For other people with the flicker, what plugins do you have?

Posted by: Blakems

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Great follow-up article, can't wait until I see someone like amazon use these techniques. Anyway, I was working on a site (http://www.axonodesign.com/) using pixy's rollover effect and had the flicker problem still occur after changing my settings in IE6. The problem however was on the Apache server I was using still causing it to flicker. What I did was for Apache servers 1.3.6 and later. I use these lines in the into the httpd.conf or .htaccess file. to disable Vary headers for the IE browser BrowserMatch "MSIE" brokenvary=1 BrowserMatch "Mozilla/4.[0-9]{2}" brokenvary=1 BrowserMatch "Opera" !brokenvary SetEnvIf brokenvary 1 force-no-vary It worked after that with no flicker.

Posted by: Emilio Vanni

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Blakems said: "can't wait until I see someone like amazon use these techniques" I think someone else will renew it's tab method first ;-) btw, outstanding article: thanks to the ALA staff!

Posted by: Jay Jones (JabezStone)

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Awesome article, Doug. I just wanted to note a variation on the current state that may be useful to some. Here, since we regularly use includes for our navs (for consistency) it isn't possible to just class an
as current... each page would need it's own nav. To get around this, we class the of each page instead, then reference the different styles thusly... body.home ul.nav{ } or body.aboutus ul.nav{ } Works like a charm, and only requires one markup of the list.

Posted by: Anne

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
If there are any spaces around the child selector, IE5.0 (Windows) will apply the style rule, so: li > a{color:green;} /* green in IE5.0 */ li>a{color:green;} /* default in IE5.0 */ For the rest, great article!

Posted by: Blakems

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Oh, I forgot, we will see this method used on apple.com first, before amazon. ;)

Posted by: Rajeev Sharma

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I'll try that on my Apache (real) server. However, for the IIS server running on my home machine, is there any way to to do this? Global.asa maybe?

Posted by: Rajeev Sharma

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Hmm... I uploaded to my test (friend's) server, and the fix isn't working. I put the exact thing you wrote in the .htaccess files for those directories. Maybe it's just my machine. Please try these: http://www.treespasm.com/rajeev/tabs/v1/ex10a.html http://www.treespasm.com/rajeev/tabs/v2/v2.html Does it work for other people?

Posted by: Mark Shiel

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I'm using IE 6 on IE with all patches too. Matching the version numbers with those others with problems. Plugin wise i don't have the same, mainly IE spell and flashget. Tested on machine at work. WinME with IE 6 works fine, tested on our XP machine and it does not!

Posted by: Martijn ten Napel

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Sorry to intrude yet again on the same subject, but my slow brain is starting to understand. If you omit the IE5/Mac hack in the code and you insert both the display:block and float:left into the css declaration for the a-tag and the li-tag, does that only cause a problem in Opera 7, or do other browsers encounter serious problems as well? I have tried to understand what is written about the float property on the W3C website and googled around a bit, but I cannot detect if a float in a float in a float -- starting to sound like nested tables -- is not permitted theoretically. The upside of all this: a lot of people are working with the concepts of this article right now and for that I have to say that this seems to be the most inspiring ALA article since the article about ALA version 2.

Posted by: florian

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
The Tab is blinking with me too XP IE6 :/ looks awful, but i would love the article if it worked.

Posted by: Gilles C

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
... on my PC running Windows ME. No blinking noticed. Maybe XP has something to do with that. I love this article on Tabs. I'll draw a different model of Tab (a slanted one) and then will try it with a Web Page I'm working on. I've been trying to find a nice CSS Tab to use for quite a while, and if it's working as well as it looks, and with most Browsers, I will adopt it... Thanks for coming up with it. Oh, and what I really need is a system with Subnav Tabs, like this one here at http://www.homelesspixel.de/tabs/tabs.html, which was my favorite until now. Gilles C

Posted by: Jay Goldman

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Thanks for the great article! We are now using the tabs on our site, which launches tomorrow. A quick thought from a usability perspective - the current tab shouldn't really be a link since the link will just take the user back to the current page. We solved the problem by still using an anchor, but not specifying an href for it:
Current Tab
Works everywhere and still validates. Jay

Posted by: Christian

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Great article. I was thinking that it would be nice if, say, list-o-matic was able to take the concepts outlined here and distill them into a 15-steps (or however many)tutorial, without all the extra stuff that Dave throws in that might scare some people off. Now that would be truly useful!

Posted by: verdon

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
great article here... re: http://www.homelesspixel.de/tabs/tabs.html On another note, the link referenced above is a bit of a mess in Safari

Posted by: Tanny O'Haley

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I'm wondering what a screen reader would do with the tag. Do you know why the
tag has been used for menus instead of the tag? Wonderful article, thank you this and the additional articles you have on your web site.

Posted by: Matt

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Yep, broken as hell here on Win2000/IE6 too. No rollovers, tabs disappear.

Posted by: Tanny O'Haley

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Works fine with IE 6 and XP with all the patches from MS. No flicker and really beautiful. I don't mind the extra hack for IE, it's part of programming. Everything can't be perfect as much as we would want it to be.

Posted by: Kwan

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I'm having flicker problems here too. I haven't been to one site that's been posted thus far in the discussion of this article that uses this technique (or any variation of it) that displays the rollovers without flickering. Nevertheless, great article. Let's see if we can figure out this IE6/WinXP bug though.

Posted by: jlc

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
http://www.homelesspixel.de/tabs/tabs.html - looks strange in IE5.1/Mac as well. Great article.

Posted by: Kiffin Gish

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I thought that CSS was originally created in order to make our lives easier when it comes to designing effective web sites. However, I get the impression that things are just getting more and more complicated. Out of hand, really. These kind of gymnastics need to be built into the technology as integral elements, not as bits and pieces which in the end could capsize the ship.

Posted by: Brad

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Doesn't work in IE5/Mac either.

Posted by: Crys

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
When I tried to apply the fix given to my site's menubar, Moz Firebird .7.0 on Win98 didn't pickup the > selector reapplied width. The example works just fine so it's something about how I adapted it to fit my code. IUf anyone has a few minutes... Thank you: ul#menu li { float:left; font-size: 140%; margin:0; padding:0; } ul#menu a { width:.1em; float:left; display:block; padding:0; margin: 0 .125em; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; } ul#menu>a {width:auto;} /* Commented Backslash Hack hides rule from IE5-Mac \*/ ul#menu a {float:none;} /* End IE5-Mac hack */ ul#menu a span { display:block; margin:0; padding:5px 15px 4px; }

[url="/fiction/"id="this">Home

Fiction[/url]

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[url="/maps/"]Maps[/url]

[url="/art/"]Artwork[/url]

[url="/links/"]Links[/url]

[url="/search/"]Search[/url]

Posted by: Gilles C

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Super! Here is to give you an idea of how I want to use it. http://www.gtechblues.com/gtblues2.html It's far from being finished, I just patched your tabs with what I was using so far to see if I could use your idea with a submenu. I took out the topnav tabs and replaced them with yours and bingo, it's still working the way I want. At least now I know that I can put some more time on it to get a page with a better look... and a cleaner source without extra stuff. Thanks.

Posted by: Martijn ten Napel

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
re : http://www.alistapart.com/discuss/slidingdoors2/4/#c5333 I don't know what a screen reader would do with the menu tag, but reading http://www.htmlhelp.org/reference/html40/lists/menu.html is says: "MENU is deprecated in HTML 4.0 in favor of UL."

Posted by: David Hunt

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
It's an interesting technique and a good tutorial. The problem is that if the window isn't wide enough for the tabs, they wrap downwards. In my opinion, it looks unprofessional. It's can be more of an issue when it occurs in the user interface of a web application. If you have a solution to that problem that doesn't involve hard-coded widths, I'd love to see it.

Posted by: Paul Bellamy

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I've been trying to implement this code to work from an external stylesheet on IE5.2 Mac OSX. It works in every single browser I've got on both PC and Mac (Opera, Mozilla, Safari etc) except ie5.2 - it does work when I place the stylesheet in the XHTML document, but as soon as I try to refer to it externally (either as a LINKed file or as an @import) the formatting breaks. Some of it gets through (colours, no bullets on the list) but other than that it's still formatted like a list, and the background images are ranged over to the other side of the screen and displayed in all their 400px wide glory. Anyone else experienced this truly frustrating phenomena? I don't want to have loads of css info in the headers of all my documents, and definitely don't want to do any browser checking.

Posted by: brett

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I'm getting the flicker effect as well, regardless of browser cache settings. Based on the number of people reporting this issue on configurations that are very common (IE 6, win2k, winxp), i'd be concerned about using this technique in production just yet.

Posted by: Douglas Bowman

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
After a week and a half of testing this on every machine I could find -- a mix of 98/2k/XP machines, some at various cafes, friends parents' houses, public terminals, and even some slow-rendering copies of Virtual PC (some on broadband, at least 4 on dial-up) -- I couldn't replicate any problems of background-image flickering. And I really tried. I looked everywhere I could. As long as IE/Win was left at the default cache setting ("Automatically"), with a reasonable amount of disk space reserved for temp files, the images held completely steady as many times as I moused over them. All of the machines tested (15-20) were standard-issue real-world machines, usually with default settings left in place. Outside of un unknown browser bug we haven't yet uncovered, I supsect some of the development environments used by more experienced ALA readers may have just enough customized to prevent standard image caching. Either that, or could somehow be a web server setting. I've seen some blogs on Blogger's blogspot domain where background images applied to anchors flicker every single time. When files were moved to another server, they were fine (with same browser settings). If anyone can figure out what the oddity is that's causing a few people to see image flickering (besides the wrong browser setting), we'd appreciate it. Thanks for the feedback.

Posted by: Eric Delord

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
May I suggest using the tag for the extra markup as in:
[url="/links/"]Links[/url]
- Wonderful article!

Posted by: Dan

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I've been wondering this for a while now... what's the deal with the three digit colors in the style sheets? For instance, in this article, the author has this in his style sheet (I took the unnecessary attributes out): #header #current a{ color: #333; } Is this correct? Why not #333333?

Posted by: Rajeev Sharma

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Well, for some proof of the bug's existance, I've captured screenshots of the flicker (very hard to do, only does it for a millisecond on broadband) and the hover state of the tabs. I believe it's not been metioned, but the tabs don't change backgrounds (move the background image), but just change text color. Here's some images. Shure hope this can be fixed, because it sure looks great in Mozilla! [img]http://www.treespasm.com/rajeev/tabs/flicker.png[/img] [img]http://www.treespasm.com/rajeev/tabs/hover.png[/img]

Posted by: Douglas Bowman

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Note to everyone, in case it wasn't clear: Example 8a is the only version which includes extra elements to get the hover change working in IE. After Example 8a, I dropped the extra span intentionally and reverted to the cleaner version -- so there isn't any hover effect for Ex. 9 and 10 in IE, other than the text color. If you want the hover working in IE, see Example 8a, and its brief mention in the article text.

Posted by: Me

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Doesnt work in Safari, though. ( But nice anyway ! )

Posted by: M. Douglas Wray

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I'm already using it and LOVING it. Now if I can just get my H# tags to work right! CSS has changed my life. I'm Doug Wray and I'm a web developer. (/goofy music)

Posted by: askinya_xoxlitude

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
The whole concept is looking good, but why use a single image, when it might cause problems? As to me 2 images(normal/hover) are easier to work with, especially when you need to develop variations.Of course you dont need a preloader, just put the over image into a hidden layer on top of the page. askinya xoxlitude

Posted by: Aleksandar Vacic

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I've used some of this CSS code in another project (not tabs), and stumbled on a problem with IE/Win region fix. If the name has more than one word (try Our products instead of Products), that tab item will break into two lines (to be precise number-of-words lines). Solution is to code it like this: *html #header a { width: .1em; white-space: nowrap; } This works in IE 5.5 and 6, but not in IE 5 which doesn't support white-space property. So, you can either neglect that, or you can make width: 8em or some other possible value. Or you can ignore it completly if you have high-enough background images. Thanks to Tantek, IE 5.x hacks can be placed to separate file to deminish the updating problem.

Posted by: Aleksandar Vacic

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Ahh...I missed the end of the article where Doug notes the same thing. Sorry for the noise.

Posted by: Rick Prentice

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Loved the tutorial, but it doesn't work in my mac IE5 or N6.. any suggestions?

Posted by: Haunani

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Hello Doug, Thank you for this wonderful tutorial, I've learned so much. I noticed the difference in the examples given for 8a and 9 and 10. so I'm am trying to incorporate both examples of the WinIE hover fix to the targetted tab via the Id. So far..I'm close..but it's tricky and I'm still unsuccessful. It seems that the targeted tab code gets wiggy with the rollover code. I have the rollover code working, but the target tab ends up being the images reversed in color and orientation. I'm thinking the span tag has something to do with it. I wondered if you have solved this and can offer a hint. I've enjoyed playing with this code and love the brevity of it. Mahalo - Haunani

Posted by: Haunani

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
hi, I figured it out. I added span code to get the functionality working the way I wanted code: #home #nav-home, #news #nav-news, #products #nav-products, #about #nav-about, #contact #nav-contact { background-position:100% -150px; border-width:0; } #home #nav-home a, #news #nav-news a, #products #nav-products a, #about #nav-about a, #contact #nav-contact a { background-position:0% -150px; color:#333; } #home #nav-home a span, #news #nav-news a span, #products #nav-products a span, #about #nav-about a span, #contact #nav-contact a span{ background-position:100% -150px; color:#333; }

Posted by: Rajeev Sharma

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Haunani, is this a fix for the IE6/XP problem or your own personal brew? If it is the fix, please post the complete source! (example number edited, CSS changed, markup changed)

Posted by: Elliot

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
In ex: 8a, after having shifted styles around, Doug is instructing the header list items to display inline and the header anchors to float left. If the list items are already instructed to display inline, why is it necessary to float the anchors contained in the list items to the left? If you don't do this, the layout falls apart, but I can't figure out why. I'm sure there is a simple explanation, but somehow I'm not grasping it.

Posted by: Greg

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I've controlled the multi-word tabs from wrapping with white-space:nowrap; but the menu I have is wider than the page in low res (800x600) and the list items wrap. white-space:nowrap; doesn't seem to work if applied to #header or #header ul. Any ideas?

Posted by: Jerry Cain

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I used the sliding door concept at eldoradosurgicenter.com but now the customer wants the tabs and subnavbar to stay at the top when scrolling. Obviously, this can easily be done using frames. However, how does one call up the "Current" set of tab images when using frames? i.e., when a user clicks a tab, the tab that was clicked is highlighted. How do you achieve that with the sliding door concept in frames?

Posted by: Jerry Cain

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
When I implemented the sliding door concept at eldoradosurgicenter.com, the navbar div (the one with the tabs) was superimposed on the following div which is the subnavbar when using Mozilla Firebird, Konqueror, and Galeon. This does't happen with IE 6. In order to get around this (where one div overlaps the following div), I had to place the tabs bar and the subnavbar into a table. Obviously, I don't like that. How can I get the browsers in Linux to display one div right after the a previous one without overlapping? Btw, this only seems to occur when there are floats involved.

Posted by: Arni D

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Truly informative article!! But with all the issues raised (some solved, some not) couldn't someone compile the source code + fixes somewhere so it's easy to copy n'paste?? Just for the sake of not having to go through the 2 articles + 7 pages of comments... :/ Hope this XP bug gets sorted. That is the only thing that makes me reluctant to use it for a client's site yet. Pukka!/Awesome! (delete accordingly)

Posted by: Rajeev Sharma

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Wow, this is really weird. When I started up my browser, the flicker stoped happening. Maybe this is one of those "automatic IE updates" (I read they existed on quirksmode.com, but they haven't been proved to exist). Anyone else experiencing this?

Posted by: nash esh

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
No flickering on win98se + ie6.0.2800.1106. Btw, many great thanks for those two articles.

Posted by: Bob Easton

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Thanks Doug! It's superb, especially with the niceties added in part II. What do you recommend as a technique for centering the set of tabs in the viewport? A quick stab at putting text-align:center on the ul didn't do it.

Posted by: Rajeev Sharma

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Well, there are two different methods for centering a block in CSS. Since i'm not the expert that came up with them, here are the original sites: http://bluerobot.com/web/css/center1.html http://bluerobot.com/web/css/center2.html Of course the second one only works if you set a width, but still check it out anyway :).

Posted by: Banned in Boston

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
First of all, my compliments: both articles are clearly written, have great examples, demonstrate (highly!) impressive CSS acumen and the resulting tabs _look_ great. That said (and I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but so be it...), I have to take strong exception to the section of (Part II) entitled "No Current Tab". You just CAN'T have a set of tabs without one of them being selected. Period. Full stop. No exceptions--don't do it! (And yes, I _have_ seen countless examples (for example, the old Yahoo) where people _have_ attempted to do this anyway.) To clarify, what I mean by "CAN'T" is not that it is _technically_ impossible (of course it is possible, as Example 7 in the article demonstrates), it is just really, really unwise. So, I'm saying "can't" in the sense that you "can't" let your two year old play with a lighter or matches. Look, these CSS-generated 'tabs' (and the similar GUI widgets that they are modeled on) are actually just visual metaphores for a real (physical) set of tabs . . . like you'd see on manila folders and on file cabinet hanging folders. Now with the physical folders, one (and only one) folder _has_ to be in front. You can't have two (or more) of them simultaneously be front-most. Right about now some may be thinking: hey, we're in the virtual (not physical) world here; why don't we break free of the restraints? Well, not only does having "no current tab" break the metaphore, it causes serious usability problems. If you don't have one of the tabs selected (current), then the user _does not know where they are_ in reference to the (implied or apparent) navigation that the set of tabs supports. And if they are unsure as to where they are now, they will also have a (much) more difficult time deciding where to go next. Now if your navigation is simple and the navigation paths are clearly labeled (again, think of Yahoo), then the latter difficulty is lessened (but is still there); for unfamiliar site/applications; poorly labeled paths; or branching navigation flows the difficulty will be worse. For completness' sake, I should also mention that using tab sets for open-ended navigation (like Yahoo does) or for "a registration process" (as the article mentions) or any other process for that matter, is just a bad idea in the first place. If their usage is confined to just using them as they were originally intended (i.e. to space-multiplex a lot of GUI elements in an overall fixed-size area--for example: for property sheets) then these problems can be avoided. Thanks for listening; let the flames begin... ;-)

Posted by: Justin

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I ran through this excellent tutorial and am excited to try out the techniques discussed. I thought I'd mention that IE will never cease to amaze. Throughout the article, I noticed the clickable region problems (using IE 5.5). Throughout Part 1 and including Example 7 in Part 2, my clickable region was faulty. Then in Example 8 my clickable region was fixed to include the entire tab. However in the final version (Example 9), my clickable region returned to the smaller region: the entire tab, but missing the left image area of the tab. Figured I'd point this out since lots of people are still using IE 5.x. Thanks for the great two-part article!

Posted by: Michael Leditschke

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
This design seems to assume that the tab content will come after all the menu items. Changing tabs involves a server round trip to update the tab content. Is it possible to combine some of the techniques used in the suckerfish article with this article, plus a little javascript magic, to avoid this round-trip? My markup might look like

Tab 1 title
.... content of tab 1

Tab 2 title
.... content of tab 2

I can see how I can use display:none to hide the content of the inactive tabs, but how do I get the div content under the active tab to appear below ALL the tabs? I'd like the content to somehow "float" beneath all the tabs. Thanks

Posted by: Jonathan Snook

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
What about using the 'behavior' property in IE and creating an HTC file to access the background position of the parentNode instead of adding extra span tags to accomplish the same thing? And then in doing so, you could remove the box model hack and reset the height and width in the HTC. This certainly keeps your HTML simple, although, at the cost of a more complicated implementation of having to create an HTC file.

Posted by: Steve Clay

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Just use a single image of both complete tabs.The way the background images are positioned and overlapped, there's no need to use seperate images for the left and right. This saves an image request and any worry that the two slices optimized my end up with slightly unmatched palettes.

Posted by: Rajeev Sharma

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Yes! I've figured out the source of the IE6/XP bug! When I was scouring the settings of the XP machine that worked, I noticed that the cache size was set to a small amount (20MB). My cache on my home machine (which displayed the bug) had a cache size of 895MB (by default). When I changed it to 20MB, everything started working. It seems that with a larger cache size the browser does not check for newer versions of files at the right time. Well, at least we know it isn't a code error!

Posted by: wyktor

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Hey guys,, I also moved to tableless layouts as most of you did. but there's still one situation where I use tables. when I need to keep certain graphic or text element at the bottom of the page (something like here http://www.mldgroup.com). How should I resolve this with div's? thanks,,

Posted by: Gabriel Radic

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
You could actually use the same image for both the item (e.g. the LI element) and for the link. They will combine just fine.

Posted by: Chantal Samson

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I also had the flicker problem with IE6/W2K. Reducing the cache size to 20MB eliminated the flickering of the tabs. I'm not sure this resolves anything, since the flicker problem remains unpredictable. Does anyone know what is the default cache size setting for IE6? Thanks.

Posted by: Robin Patt-Corner

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
This works flawlessly! However we have a need to place an image of a line (not a line that can be mocked up by a border) at the bottom of the tabs and hence in the BG Challenging, even when you adjust the padding to the depth of the imaged line, because the sliding left door wants very badly to be in front (the whole point, right!) and gets in front of the bg image no matter how you pad it. So ... we need to either bring the BG forward or slide the left door behind the bg but still in front of the right door. Ideas? z-axis? R.

Posted by: arnold kim

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Here's an odd one http://www.chaosmint.com/testcss/test.html This flickers for mr in Windows IE 6 http://www.alistapart.com/d/slidingdoors2/v1/ex10.html this does not. Exact same code. thoughts? arn

Posted by: Drew

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Okay. I'm not intelligent enough to add Step 8a's IE fix to Step 10a. Everytime I try weird stuff happens. I spent an hour on it last night and just couldn't work it out. Sad, I know. Could someone please help me or post the answer outright?

Posted by: David Chatsuthiphan

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I got rid of the flicker by clearing my cache. Works fine now. The ability of the tabs to resize is awesome. But, given this flicker problem (caused by the browser, not the code), would any professional web designers implement this technique on a highly visible site? I'm especially interested if Doug would feel secure using it on a site such as www.adaptivepath.com. I don't think I could =/

Posted by: MCP

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
If anyone has the full code (up to step 10a) with the IE rollover fix included, I would be grateful if you could post it here.

Posted by: Hiro Katsumi

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I am going to take a new approach for my Japanese web site. The sliding door is a great article and definitely I want to use on my pages. I tested all the examples (example 1-10) and I found a problem with Japanese character environment. If I reduce browser's width, it start character wrap within a tab, further reducing window width a tab itself wraps. This does not occur in alphabet characters. Is there any fix for this?

Posted by: Hiro Katsumi

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I forgot to tell one more point. Tab words of example 10 is complete vertical writing regardless width of windows. I can send html pages which show the problems if anyone challenges fixing this issue.

Posted by: Curtney Jacobs

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Does anyone have an example of turning the tabs sideways? _CJ

Posted by: FataL

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Did anyone correct problem with MSN for MAC OS X ? In this browser tabs looks like in Safari (100% width) without hack...

Posted by: FataL

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Did anyone correct problem with MSN for MAC OS X ? In this browser tabs looks like in Safari (100% width) without hack...

Posted by: MCP

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
I think that many people had problems incorporating the IE rollover fix into example 10. This is what I came up with: body { background: #fff; margin: 0; padding: 0; color: #000; font: x-small/1.5em Georgia,Serif; voice-family: "\"}\""; voice-family:inherit; font-size: small; } html>body { font-size: small; } #header { float: left; width: 100%; background: #dae0d2 url(bg.gif) repeat-x bottom; font-size: 93%; line-height: normal; } #header ul { margin: 0; padding: 10px 10px 0; list-style: none; } #header li { margin: 0; padding: 0; display: inline; } #header a { float: left; background: url(left_both.gif) no-repeat left top; width: .1em; margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; border-bottom: 1px solid #765; font-weight: bold; color: #765; text-decoration: none; } #header a span { float: left; display: block; background: url(right_both.gif) no-repeat right top; margin: 0; padding: 5px 15px 4px 6px; } #header>ul a { width: auto; } /* Commented Backslash Hack hides rule from IE5-Mac \*/ #header a span { float: none; } /* End IE5-Mac hack */ #header a:hover span { color: #333; } #home #nav-home a, #news #nav-news a, #products #nav-products a, #about #nav-about a, #contact #nav-contact a { background-position: 0 -150px; border-width: 0; } #home #nav-home a span, #news #nav-news a span, #products #nav-products a span, #about #nav-about a span, #contact #nav-contact a span { background-position: 100% -150px; padding-bottom: 5px; color: #333; } #header a:hover { background-position: 0% -150px; color: #333; } #header a:hover span { background-position: 100% -150px; } It works fine for these browsers: - Internet Explorer 5.01 SP2 - Internet Explorer 5.5 SP2 - Internet Explorer 6.0 SP2 - MSN Explorer 6.0 - Mozilla 1.5 - Mozilla Firebird 0.7 - Netscape Navigator 7.1 - Opera 7.11 If you find any bugs, please post here.

Posted by: rz

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
i've taken liberally from doug's techniques to add drop downs to a very similar menu layout. i've got a working solution in the latest gecko browsers, ie 5+, opera 7.11 (windows). on the mac side it works in safari and gecko browsers, but goes absolutely wacko in ie 5.2. view it here - http://rzand.homedns.org:8080/main/home btw, this layout seems to be more browser friendly than the brainjar example, another demo i have borrowed heavily from. anyone seen this before and have any ideas? btw, i'm sniffing the browser on the server side with php and including local styles that override those in the stylesheet rather than using css hacks.

Posted by: Charles

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Rz, do you think it will help win Netscape 4 users over to your viewpoint to lecture them about what browser they are using? Actually, your site seems to work fine in Netscape 4 with JavaScript off. I just don't see your interface work. And that's actually the great thing about the technique in this article. If you have a modern browser, you see the cool stuff. If you have Netscape 4, the site still works. (Well, except for any links to a mid-page id, but aside from that.) Can't upgrade to Netscape 6 until I buy a new Mac (requires OS X, which doesn't run on an 8600), iCab crashes too much on my unit, and I'd rather not use IE, even if it's IE/Mac. Call me stubborn, but it's my attention you're trying to get, and I'm darned if I'm going to buy a new computer just to visit your site.

Posted by: Benjamin

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
First off - yes, this is a great technique, and a very easy-to understand tute. I've been using these tabs to allow navigation through a one-way process (specifically an online ordering process) - the user can see where they are in the process, and click back to see or change previous steps/tabs. However, the user shouldn't be able to click forward more than one tab at a time (if you're one step one, you can't jump straight to step 4) So - how can we create a tab which is disabled, or greyed out? If we remove the anchor element, we no longer have a second 'sliding door' to apply the style to... anyone got any ideas? preferably without introducing extra spans...fanks!

Posted by: squareman

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Actually, it isn't a broken or unusable interface. There are other homologous tab examples: cookbooks, reference books, VW Owner's Manuals. In these examples, often you'll see tabs for the referential content; but they are all still have preceding material before the first tab: cover, title page, contents, introductions. No flame. Just rebuttal. ;)

Posted by: Faridur Rahman Choudhury

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Excellent stuff but this does not work in IE 5/Mac whereas it works perfectly in IE5.x+ for PC and also NS7 for both PC and Mac. Is there any hack to make it work for IE/Mac? Thnx

Posted by: Anthony

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
In your first article about sliding navs you mentioned the abilility to put a logo in the header# - how do you ad this? Thanks - great CSS!

Posted by: Lu

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Okay, not so mind-boggling, but certainly opens the lid on what CSS can do. Who would have thought compliance could be so 'cool' ;-)

Posted by: petr

2012-01-31T13:00:49+00:00
Hi, I would like to ask if there is any posiblity to center
"tabs" to the header div. I don't want to center the header div but only ul and li. The reason is because I will dynamicly change amount of tabs and I can't center it to the page right now without changing header width. :-( For beter understandig you can look at http://www.daend.cz/FTP/WEB-templates/01/ Right now it looks like tabs are + - centered. But if I remove one from the list it is not centered in the header div with black border. Thanks for your help.