HIG: tabwidgets

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hi all..

first, some broken link status:

	 http://openusability.org/projects/kde-hig/

links several times (as the project home page) to:

	http://www.kde.org/areas/guidelines/html/

anyways... i want to talk about tab widgets in the new HIG and hopefully get 
some text in there.

there are 5 areas that probably need to be covered, please comment:

0. When to use tabs
1. Where to place tabs in a window
2. Standard Actions
3. Context menus
4. Mouse interaction

When to use tabs: ???

something should probably be said about frames in tab widgets. in Qt4 we have 
proper control over this, which we didn't in Qt3. huzzah!

Where to place tabs in a window: Where the common locus of attention is. This 
is usually the top of the window, except for command line and chat 
applications which tend to put new information at the bottom of the window 
and therefore keep the user's attention there. In such cases the tabs should 
appear at the bottom of the window.

Standard Actions:
The following actions should be available if it makes sense within the 
workflow of the application. For instance, while it makes sense to offer 
"Duplicate Tab" in a web browser, it doesn't in a chat application.

Action		Shortcut		Required
-------		---------------	-----------
New Tab		Ctrl+Shift+N	Yes
Detach Tab	Ctrl+Shift+D	No
Duplicate Tab			No
Reload Tab	F5		No
Next Tab		Ctrl+Left_Arrow	Yes
Previous Tab	Ctrl+Right_Arrow	Yes

we'll want to define what the standard names for these are (e.g. 
tab_duplicate) but we'll need to wait for the xmlgui replacement to get into 
svn to know exactly how that stuff will work.

Context Menus: this should be a description of the context menu including 
spots for customization. for instance:

New Tab
Reload Tab
Detach Tab
Duplicate Tab
-----
Other Tabs
----
Close Tabs

a question here is what to put in Other Tabs. in konsole it's "Switch To Tab", 
in konversation it's "Switch To" and in konqueror it's "Other Tabs" which 
includes actions that apply to all other tabs.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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