Tabbed document interface

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In the area of graphical user interfaces, a tabbed document interface (TDI) is one that allows multiple documents to be contained within a single window, using tabs to navigate between them. It is an interface style most commonly associated with web browsers, web applications, text editors, and preference panes.

Tabbed document browsing as illustrated with Mozilla Firefox.

Yahoo's current homepage features tabs at four different places.

Tabs inside Microsoft Windows XP's System Preferences pane.

The name TDI implies similarity to the Microsoft Windows standards for MDI and SDI, but TDI does not form part of the Microsoft Windows User Interface Guidelines.

Contents 1 History 2 Compliance To Windows User Interface Guidelines 2.1 Comparison to SDI 2.1.1 Advantages 2.1.2 Disadvantages 2.2 Comparison to MDI 2.2.1 Advantages 2.2.2 Disadvantages 3 Example programs (Alphabetical) 3.1 Instant messengers 3.2 Spreadsheet programs 3.3 Terminal program 3.4 Text editors 3.5 Web browsers 3.6 Web applications 3.7 Window managers 4 See also 5 External Links

[edit] History

The NeWS version of UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor was the first commercially available product to pioneer the use of multiple tabbed windows in 1988. It was used to develop an authoring tool for the Ben Shneiderman's HyperTIES browser (the NeWS workstation version of The Interactive Encyclopedia System), in 1988. HyperTIES also supported pie menus for managing windows and browsing hypermedia documents with PostScript applets. Don Hopkins developed and released several versions of tabbed window frames for the NeWS window system as free software, which the window manager applied to all NeWS applications, and enabled users to drag the tabs around to any edge of the window.

Six years later, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser in 1994. Independently, the founders of Opera built an MDI-based browser in the same year (via a technical preview not available publicly; a public release was made in 1996). The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by a number of others like IBrowse in 1999, Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4), Mozilla in 2001 (through the MultiZilla extension in April of 2001 and a built-in tabbed browsing mode added to Mozilla 0.9.5 in October of 2001), Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. As of 2006, most graphical web browsers support a tabbed interface, including Internet Explorer 7. Software, such as the freeware AM Browser, is also available to add a TDI around earlier versions of Internet Explorer. OmniWeb version 5, released August 2004, includes visual tabbed browsing which displays preview images of pages in a drawer to the left or right of the main browser window. Avant Browser, Maxthon and Slim Browser are some of the most popular tabbed browsers using Internet Explorer's rendering engine.

[edit] Compliance To Windows User Interface Guidelines

There is some debate about how the TDI interface fits in with the Microsoft Windows User Interface Guidelines. In many ways the Workbook window management model most closely resembles TDI. However this is a relatively recent addition to the Windows User Interface Guidelines, and most developers still prefer to view SDI or MDI as the primary document models for Windows.

[edit] Comparison to SDI

[edit] Advantages

One important advantage of the tabbed document interface is that it holds many different documents logically under the one window, instead of holding a large number of small child windows. Another is that sets of related documents can be grouped within each of several windows. Using tabs instead of new windows to display content creates a smaller memory footprint and therefore reduces the strain on the operating system (however, opening several tabs at once will temporarily bog down the system). Tabbed web browsers often allow users to save their browsing session and return to it later.

[edit] Disadvantages

Although the tabbed document interface does allow for multiple views under one window, there are problems with this interface. One such problem is dealing with many tabs at once. When a window is tabbed to a certain number that exceeds the available resolution of the monitor, the tabs clutter up (this is the same problem as with SDI but moved to another place in the user interface).

Multi-row tabs are a second issue that will appear in menu dialogs in some programs. Dealing with multiple rows of tabs in one window has two disadvantages:

• It creates excess window clutter
• It complicates what should be an easy-to-read dialog

Finding a specific tab in a 3 or 4 level tabular interface can be difficult for some people. Part of the issue with this difficulty lies in the lack of any sorting scheme. Tabs can be strewn about without any sense of order, thus looking for a tab provides no meaningful understanding of a position to a tab relative to other tabs. Additionally, the clutter created by mutiple tabs can create a dialog that is unusually small, with the tabs above it dominating the window.

Thus, although tabbed windows are adequte in environments where there is a minimal necessity for tabs (around ten tabs or less), this scheme does not scale, and alternate methods may be required to address this issue.

Among the methods for addressing scalability of many tabs:

• reduce the width of individual tags, so that more can fit within the available area
• introduce scrolling to enable tabs to occupy a non-visible region of the screen
• introduce sections through any of various means, to spread tabs out to multiple areas

Large numbers of tabbed windows scale better with the tabs along the left or right edges of the window, instead of the top or bottom edges. That is because tab labels are usually much wider than they are tall. The NeWS version of the UniPress Emacs text editor placed tabs along the right window edge, and laid windows out in a vertical column, so each tab was initially visible, and the user could use them to raise and lower the windows, drag them around in the column, or pull them out to anywhere on the screen.

Better yet, tabbed window interfaces can give the user the freedom to position the tabs along any edge, so all four edges are available to organize different groups of tabs as the user or application sees fit. The PSIBER visual PostScript programming environment for NeWS had tabbed views that you could stick onto the stack (represented as a "spike"), and you could move the tabs to any edge. The NeWS pie menu and tab window manager enabled users to position the tabs anywhere along any edge, and the tabs popped up pie menus with window management functions, to uncover and bury windows, etc.

[edit] Comparison to MDI

[edit] Advantages

For people used to SDI, MDI can be confusing as windows can be hidden behind other windows. Some MDI applications lack a taskbar or menu to allow quick access to all windows, so in some cases a window can only be found by closing all others. On the other hand, since in TDI applications most tabs are visible and directly accessible, it is much harder for windows to get "lost".

[edit] Disadvantages

TDI windows must always be maximized inside their parent window, and as a result two tabs cannot be visible at the same time. This makes comparing of documents or easy copy-and-pasting between two documents more difficult. Full MDI interfaces allow for tiling or cascading of child windows, and do not suffer from these limitations.

One example of an application that allows either TDI or MDI browsing is Opera. Using TDI by default, this application also supports full MDI and can also run as an SDI application.

In order to mitigate these problems, some integrated development environments, such as recent versions of XEmacs and Microsoft's Visual Studio, provide a hybrid interface which allows splitting the parent window into multiple MDI-like "panes," each with their own separate TDI tab set. The Ion window manager does the same for the entire desktop.This provides many of the advantages of both MDI and TDI, although it can still be difficult for users to get used to. The Konqueror browser (available for the K Desktop Environment on Unix and Unix work-alikes, such as Linux) also supports multiple TDI splits within the main window.

[edit] Example programs (Alphabetical)

[edit] See also

• Multiple document interface
• Single document interface
• IDE-style interface
• Comparison of text editors

[edit] External Links

• Navigation and Module tabs at the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library.