RE: No tabbed browsing in HTML 5?

Hello Leif, 
Hello everybody,

And thank for your feed-back. My question / reflexion began as I noticed
that internet beginners / occasional surfers like tabbed-browsing rather
than the opening of a new browser instance. They get surprised when seeing
that each browser may "have its own view" about the same thing especially
with links. 

They appreciate to see in the part of the screen they are focusing on (=the
UA GUI) rather than browser instances visible at the bottom of the screen. 

These kind of customer would like to get links on their web-sites opening
tabs in case of comparing informations (research, eCommerce comparison,
evtly eLearning) but prefer opening links to third part sites (information
reference, further informations, partner information) in a new browser
instance. The reason is they want to offer as much service as possible but
in the same time, they want their visitor to stay on - or have a chance to
find back to - their web site.

Here, the web designer does not have an easy possibility to open tabs; until
now the decision is left to the user - and a lot of them do not know this.

- With "_blank" the web designer creates a completely new UA instance.
- With "_tab" (or any other nomen) the web designer could create a new
browsing instance in the same UA instance.

Going further, may be this "tab-opening" possibility would be appreciated by
people with disabilities: they could get the possibility to make sure the
web pages they visited / opened stay grouped in the same instance of the UA.


But this is only a reflexion and I did not ask to people with disabilities,
I only asked "occasional surfers" about how and why they appreciate tabbed
browsing, after I showed them what is meant with this "jargon".

I qualify as "occasional surfers" in germany and in france a little scope of
3 x sme / smi with max 15 employees (plastic, lawyers, hydraulic systems), 2
x family enterprise with max 3 employees (mechanic, sport studio), 1 x
musicology institution with 5 employees and independent workers (horse
whisperer, kinesy-therapeut, HR consultant, financial consultant, insurance
provider), CEO aged 40++, working in "real life" as well as some 5 "silver
surfer" (as growing population in EU) using internet the first group to
offer informations and the last group to collect informations requests /
evtl. buy.

Kind regards from Germany

Nathalie 
Skype call: n-at-work 
eMail: info@n-at-work.net 
URL: http://www.n-at-work.net

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-----Original Message-----
From: Justin James [mailto:j_james@mindspring.com] 
Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2008 10:16 PM
To: 'Leif Halvard Silli'
Cc: 'Justin Anthony Knapp'; john@netpurgatory.com; 'N-at-Work';
public-html@w3.org
Subject: RE: No tabbed browsing in HTML 5?

Leif -

My concern here is that I don't think that we should be delving into the
realm of defining UA's UI behavior, and the _tab proposal requires exactly
that. What I *do* like, however, is the idea that we may need a way to
create another instance of the same browsing context, forking the process,
as it were. Something like "_fork" or "_continuation" would be sufficient.

I also feel that in scenarios where the Web developer/designer requires
precise control over how a new window is created, the corresponding DOM
functions are best suited for this task.

J.Ja

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Leif Halvard Silli [mailto:lhs@malform.no]
> Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2008 3:37 PM
> To: Justin James
> Cc: 'Justin Anthony Knapp'; john@netpurgatory.com; 'N-at-Work'; public-
> html@w3.org
> Subject: Re: No tabbed browsing in HTML 5?
> 
> Nathalie, perhaps you could explain how you envisionaged the
> effect of _tab? I'll offer my perspective here.
> 
> Justin, Lynx could also have had a form of Tabs support. In an UA
> without Tabs, it should probably just open a new Window, though it
> possibly could create a some kind of grouping as well (see below).
> 
> With "_blank" one creates a new browsing context, where the new
> context has no "link" with the originating context. This, in fact,
> seems to me to be exactly what we would expect from a "_tab" also.
> Except that for "_tab" one would expect that the link would open
> in a Tab and not in a Window. Thus, a tab is forming a context
> anyhow, since the Tabs of a Window form a kind of group.
> 
> Even Lynx and other UAs without Tab support in a GUI sense, could
> develope a way to group several pages into one "usage context".
> And until they support something like that, the "_tab" would have
> the same effect as "_blank".
> 
> One possible benefit of defining _tab could be that we could also
>   define a cleaner _blank, where _blank would *always* open a new
> Window even if the browser does have support for Tabs.
> 
> The thing with _blank is that many authors apparently expect that
> it opens in a new Window, and rely on that behaviour. By that
> expectation, they kind of expect the *opposite* of what the draft
> says that _blank does. (Draft says that _blank creates a new
> context, thus - that there is no "link" between them. )
> 
> When a new Window opens above the current Tab or Window, then all
> it takes to get back to the originating Tab/Window, is that one
> closes the Window. But if the page opened in a new Tab instead of
> a in a new Window, the outcome of closing the Tab is uncertain.
> Quite likely you land in another Tab than the originating one.
> 
> Example: An Internet Banking service I use has a calendar in the
> form of a date selector, which opens in a new window. Upon picking
> a date, the window closes and the author then expects that the
> user will be back in the Banking page again. But in fact, because
> the calendar opened in a new Tab, and because I might have opned a
> new parallell Tab side-by-side the Banking page before I chose the
> Calendar, I might land in that nearby Tab instead of the Banking
> page. Annoying!
> 
> The question still is: When is target:_tab useful? A possible
> answer could be: On start pages of many kinds. Any page where the
> author expects the users to read the links of the page in
> parallell tabs. Also, if you operate a page without a mouse, then
> it might be convenient if it is simple to open the links in Tabs.
> 
> Even so, I am still not certain that _tab would be much used
> though. But it does seem to me to be logical to have one way to
> open a page in a Tab and another way to open a page in a new
> Window. The fact that we do not have a way to separate them today
> has at least created problems for me in my Internet Banking surfing.
> 
> Justin James 2008-09-18 18.44:
> 
> > The behavior of _blank, _self, etc. is only defined in HTML as
> referring to
> > browsing contexts. However a particular UA chooses to implement that
> is up
> > to them. _blank, _self, etc. have meaning, even within a browser like
> Lynx.
> > _tab does not. It just so happens that the most popular use case for
> _blank
> > is to open a new tab/window, but that does not mean that this is
> within the
> > scope of the HTML specification.
> >
> > J.Ja
> >
> > From: public-html-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html-request@w3.org]
> On
> > Behalf Of Justin Anthony Knapp
> > Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2008 11:43 AM
> > To: john@netpurgatory.com
> > Cc: N-at-Work; public-html@w3.org
> > Subject: Re: No tabbed browsing in HTML 5?
> >
> > It seems that most browsers have an option to "open in new window" or
> "open
> > in new tab" and that is probably best handled as a end-user issue. I
> > understand your rationale, though.
> >
> > And, as pointed out, someone will find a work-around: some script
> > bookmarklet or Firefox extension that opens the _tabs in _windows and
> > vice-versa. The notion of declaring parts of the browser is a bit
> silly to
> > me. Why not _new or _newdocument or somesuch to signify that this
> link is
> > probably not supposed to replace this document's display, but can be
> > displayed however the end user and the permissions of his program
> allow?
> >
> > -JAK
> > On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 11:33, John C. Vernaleo
> <john@netpurgatory.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 18 Sep 2008, N-at-Work wrote:
> > So what do you think about ?_tab? as an additional keyword.
> >
> > http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#target6
> >
> > I for one really don't see how that is a legit thing for authors to
> decide.
> >  Seems completely a user agent decision to me.  (Not to mention
> terminal
> > based browsers like lynx and screen readers that would have no
> reasonable
> > way to support it.)
> >
> > I can barely remember how I used the web before tabs, but I still
> wouldn't
> > want to give control of that to the html author (and as an author I
> wouldn't
> > want that control either).  If it were added to the spec, then
> browsers
> > would have to come up with a way to ignore them which seems like it
> means
> > extra work has to get done by everyone
> 
> --
> leif halvard silli