Tabs have no “down” state
alanhogan opened this issue · comments
The button-like tabs seen in the demo do not appear to depress between mousedown and mouseup (the “down” state, :active in CSS). This is different from the buttons (not that the buttons depress well at current; see #36).
Ideally — and you see this a lot in the Mac world, e.g. even in checkboxes — there is not only is the “active” state (current tab, checked checkbox…) distinguished from the inactive (non-current tabs, unchecked checkbox…) state, but both of these states have “down” or depressed states, during the click action. If possible, both active & inactive status should change in similar ways during their respective “down” states. Apple typically darkens UI elements to do this. You can see this with their checkboxes: Checked checkboxes stay blue, but darken a bit. Unchecked ones are still grey, but darken a bit. In Aristo, I think the “reverse gradient” or “lots-o-dark inner shadow” treatments would apply to these tabs (and to the buttons they are based off).
Demo of tabs I made a while back that I thought turned out really well in this regard: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/105727/web/tabs/demo.html
Huh, just noticed the original Aristo theme nails this. They call it the Segmented Control in this demo: http://cappuccino.org/aristo/showcase/
Well, I do think and hoped to argue for what I understand to be jQuery UI “tabs” to have that hit state. Is that not supported in jQuery UI, somehow?