Template talk:Navbox Tabs

Application
I'm going to hold off on applying this to any more navigation templates. Reasons for this are: looking for and fixing any more bugs in it, waiting to see how it's recieved by the ZW membership, and any more ideas on how to make it look better. I previously updated a minor navigation template that isn't too obtrusive to have a working example to showcase the layout. It can be found at Template:Shields. It shows how it works and how it simplfies the layout. The main reason I was motivated for this is the recent movement on Zelda Wiki to revamp and lay down, in writing, standards for article layout, among them was a desire to give all articles a fluid layout that does not overwhelm the reader with too much information at once (i.e. no walls of text). Naturally this extends to anything displayed on articles including navigation templates. I preferred this way over the standard hide template method that most wikis use because I didn't find it to be unique and creative enough and I didn't think it was the most effective system. For now this is only for the monobook skin, and for the most part everything is the same as it is in the previous layout visually speaking besides the amount of content. This currently has a show/hide link in it, but I'm considering removing it because I think it might cause too many bugs. 03:56, March 10, 2011 (UTC)
 * We brought this up in the Skype chat and I'll put it here too. We've found an excellent solution to the problem of having the tabs work correctly It can be found at OpenWetWare:Toggle. Hopefully we can get this set up soon and after that I'll get to work on applying it to this template. 05:26, March 10, 2011 (UTC)
 * First, I love that I'm talking to myself. Second, the new toggle scripts are absolutely beautiful. And they work great. But we still have a problem with Google Chrome not loading our scripts correctly and this script, is unfortunately, subject to it. And because of that it doesn't work on Chrome. This has nothing to do with this template or those scripts. It's a bug that has existed on our server since a previous server move and it'd have to be fixed on the server end and not here. The Chrome bug is out of my hands. Sorry people. I'll poke the powers that be into looking into the bug. 03:56, March 11, 2011 (UTC)


 * The chrome bug has been resolved. It should be good to go now. Great work, Matt. 07:40, 15 March 2011 (EDT)
 * Yeah it was a broken script that was added the same day as that server move. The main thing this needs now is to prune away the leftovers from the original version that are no longer relevant and an efficient way to have more tabs. 13:19, March 15, 2011 (UTC)

Method
I'm confused as to why this particular solution for creating tabs was chosen. The Tabber extension seems much simpler to implement and use, and has better functionality (e.g. the tabs actually show what's selected, and have hover effects). Here's an example of it in use. I'll install the extension shortly; maybe someone could try making a version of this template using that, so we can see how they compare? 08:00, 6 May 2011 (EDT)


 * I believe this solution was chosen because it could also make hidden containers and toggled content. According to Matt "[The Tabber extension is] a tag interface so it's less flexible and dynamic than what ours is. And there wouldn't be a real way to change the colors, so it'd look ugly on our skins. We've got a better solution. And the talk page has horror stories."
 * However, all the tab elements are marked with a class, so it shouldn't be too hard to change their look with some CSS code. I'm not sure what he means by "horror stories", but he is right when he says that ours is more flexible. We can place images in the tabs and bend it any shape we want. Still, it wouldn't hurt to compare the functionality of the two, would it? 09:04, 6 May 2011 (EDT)
 * Yeah, I considered Tabber, however it's more difficult to customize, and it has a lot more bugs, isn't as seamless as the JS option, refuses to let certain coding inside of it, etc. All sorts of nasty stuff. Really it'd limit what we could do, not improve. The current system works better. We could easily code some CSS to make ours have some highlighting effects on the tab. That's the thing with JS, you can easily modify it and add to it. Not so with an extension, where you have to rely upon very unreliable developers that often ignore requests or neglect to fix obvious and simple problems. 17:46, May 13, 2011 (UTC)