Which language offers the most portability in terms of tabbing a webpage menu?

Question

This may be a subjective question, I am new here so keep that in mind...

I have searched and searched and been unable to determine what the best way is the do a tabbed menu for a webpage. The webserver is Unix based, so anything .NET is out of the question. It seems that AJAX/javascript is the 'nicest' way to go, but I've heard there are issues with certain browsers (especially IE). Is this true?

I'd rather have the flexibility offered by javascript than going for purely CSS based tabs, and have the menu tabs function correctly in all/the_most browsers.

Thanks in advance for helping!

Answer 1

If you're wanting to use AJAX it depends on whether you're loading dynamic content or not. Unfortunately a lot of things can be a tad funky in IE.

You should be able to use JQuery for creating tabs, check out JQuery UI for examples or search for other plugins.

This is basically using JS and you could have a fall back CSS version incase browser doesn't support Javascript. Using JQuery also is independent of you using any other language (PHP, ASP, ASP.NET etc).

Answer 2

Hi Adam,

Welcome to SO. To answer your question, I would recommend you take a look at jQuery's tab control API:

http://jqueryui.com/demos/tabs/

The advantage of doing this on the client side is that you won't have to worry about what the backend platform supports, only browser compatibility.