YaST/Style Guide/Dialogs/Dialog with tabs

From openSUSE

What is a dialog with tabs?

A tab is a navigational widget for horizontal switching between documents. It is traditionally designed as a text label within a rectangular box with its top borders rounded. Activating a tab (usually by a mouse click) makes its associated document visible and the tab itself usually becomes highlighted to distinguish it from other inactive tabs.

A dialog with tabs is used in order to categorize the content of a module. The category is displayed in the titled section of a tab.

Each tab symbolizes an independent or hierarchically equal section. Do not use tabs to visualize a hierarchy. Use tree widgets instead.

Pros and cons of dialogs with tabs

Pros

• Clear structure of content
• User can see all categories at a glance
• Very familiar to user as widely used in most browsers and applications
• Useful for tuning already configured service with many configurable options, for the initial configuration, Wizard workflow is recommended.

Cons

• Only a limited number of tabs (approx. 5 - depends also on lengths of translations) can be used in one dialog. Too many tabs or double-rows of tabs destroys the tab's advantage of being understandable at a glance.
• No display of a hierarchy is possible.

Properties of a dialog with tabs

• Tabs are aligned horizontally
• Tabs have a titled section
• Only one tab can be active at a time

Examples

• Modem Configuration Overview in the modem module in YaST.

• Samba Server Configuration in tabs.