need help making tabs to be used by jquery tabs plugin

Question

I am completely new to CSS and can not get around making tabs. We currently have tabs like this However, these tabs are made using a bad looking <table> tag

Below is the code that produced the image in above link

  <table name="incomesummarytable" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" width="100%">
     <tr>
  <td colspan="4">
       <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
        <tr>
         <td bgcolor="#990000"><img src="/eiv/images/left_curve.gif" alt="Left Curve" width="10" height="20"></td>
         <td bgcolor="#990000"><div align="center"><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#ffffff"><b>Summary Reports</b></font></div></td>
         <td align="right" bgcolor="#990000"><img src="/eiv/images/right_curve.gif" alt="Right Curve" width="10" height="20"></td>
         <td>&nbsp;</td>
         <td bgcolor="#dddddd"><img src="/eiv/images/left_curve.gif" alt="Left Curve" width="10" height="20"></td>
         <td bgcolor="#dddddd"><div align="center"><a href="javascript:submitData('View Detail Reports');" style='text-decoration: none;'><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#000000"><b>Detail Reports</b></font></a></div></td>
         <td align="right" bgcolor="#dddddd"><img src="/eiv/images/right_curve.gif" alt="Right Curve" width="10" height="20"></td>
         <td>&nbsp;</td>
        </tr>
       </table>
      </td>

However, I am trying to use more elegant method of jquery tabs plugin. This plugin changes div's to tabs. So I am trying to find out how to convert the tabs that I have into div's so that I can use them with the jquery tab plugin.
I would appreciate some help that would at least get me started on this.

Ideally I would like the html to be as simple as

  <div id="container-1" bgcolor="#990000">
        <ul>
            <li ><a href="#fragment-1"><span>Summary</span></a></li>
            <li ><a href="#fragment-2"><span>Detailed</span></a></li>
        </ul>
        <div id="fragment-1">
            <p>Summary Info goes here:</p>
        </div>
        <div id="fragment-2">
            <p>Detailed Info goes here:</p>
        </div> 
   </div>

But I cant wrap my head around CSS that would do this.

Answer 1

See Doug Bowman's Sliding Doors Technique tutorial for easy to understand markup, CSS, and the reasoning behind it.

A List Apart is a great resource in general; you will find other great CSS technique articles there as well.

Answer 2

Have you check out jquery-ui ? There are nice examples and docs at the jquery-ui site: http://jqueryui.com/demos/tabs/.

You end up with html that looks something like this:

<div id="tabs">  
<ul>  
    <li><a href="#tabs-1">Text 1</a></li>  
    <li><a href="#tabs-2">Text 2</a></li>  
    <li><a href="#tabs-3">Text 3</a></li>  
</ul>  
<div id="tabs-1">Content Tab 1</div>  
<div id="tabs-2">Content Tab 2</div>  
<div id="tabs-3">Content Tab 3</div>  
</div>