This is Issue 49 of The Sensible Internet Design Letter. In this letter, I explain in some detail how I got an unusual HTML folder-tab interface to work. If you're not used to working in HTML, Cascading Style Sheets or JavaScript, you might want to skip ahead to the example page to decide if you have any use for the resulting interface. If so, read on, grab the HTML source, and feel free to play around with it. If not, thanks for riding along this far.
Though user interface designers keep falling back on "folders" to represent document containers visually, I don't particularly like the metaphor.
Remember, it's not how it looks, it's how it works: The tab interface isn't much to look at here, but it could be styled using CSS any number of ways.
Most of the time, see, real-life folders contain undesirable things:
- At school, an oversize folder holds your "permanent record" until the principal ominously blows the dust off it to review your entire life and determine the severity of punishment for whatever you did wrong.
- At work, folders contain things you either need to look at, need to do something about or just wish you could ignore. They often become the cages used to pass monkeys from one back to another. The bigger the monkey, the brighter the folder, I've found.
- At home, you have to keep tax returns and receipts for future tax returns in folders. And no good can come of that.
So when a recent project at my real job required design of a folder-tab style Web search interface, first I sneered. Then I got to work.
