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20030111 Saturday January 11, 2003

Tabbed Forms - Making the web look like Excel One of the things I'm working on for my day job right now is the ability to display an Excel-like UI for editing a form. So I did a search on Google tonight and found DHTML Kitchen. On this site, they had exactly what I was looking for - a howto for creating a tabbed panel system. So I've used this example to create a prototype of what I can do. This is pretty slick b/c now I can give the users a UI that looks like the Excel they're used to, and I can use the same ValidatorForm for the entire page. It even supports remembering which tab you last selected, and also allows navigation to a tab. The DHTML Kitchen also appears to have all kinds of other goodies to checkout. I'll definitely be adding it to my list of cool bookmarks.

If someone could verify that this prototype works in IE 5.5 - that'd be awesome! This is the browser we have to support at work and all my browsers are 6.0+. In return, I offer you the source in a single zip file :-) After playing with this a bit after posting - it seems like it's got a couple of issues in IE 6. The first is that a double line shows up at the bottom of the top tabs after refreshing. Clicking on any tab at the top snaps the tab bar back into place. The second is performance - it's taking 3-8 seconds to load the page - yikes! I'm still going to use it though, and hopefully optimize and fix these issues later. Posted in The Web at Jan 11 2003, 11:45:23 PM MST 4 Comments

Comments:

Hi Matt, Your demo doesn't work with my browser (IE 5.50.4807.2300). It shows a JavaScript error in line 17, column 1 "object expected". The tabs also don't work after clicking "OK in the error window. Sorry, but still HTH Fokko

Posted by F. Degenaar on January 14, 2003 at 04:35 AM MST #

Works fine for me, with exactly the same browser version as above.

Posted by Jerry Shea on January 16, 2003 at 04:32 AM MST #

Thanks Jerry - it works fine for me on a Windows 2000 machine and a Windows NT machine at work (with IE 5.5). Fokko - what OS are you using?

Posted by Matt Raible on January 16, 2003 at 06:22 AM MST #

Hi Matt, Windows NT 4.0 Build 1381, SP6. Although the configuration of IE is a given one, I couldn't detect anything unusual. In contrast to Jerry I use a german version. regards Fokko

Posted by F. Degenaar on January 17, 2003 at 12:59 AM MST #

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Matt Raible is the Lead UI Architect at LinkedIn. The opinions on this site are mine, not my employers.
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