meeting minutes from last night

[Máirín Duffy]

Asgeir Frimannsson wrote:
> I'm wondering if the left-side tabs are taking too much prime real-estate on 
> the page? 

The original mockups for Fedora applications including the tabs were 
designed for 800x600. I think 1024x768 is a more realistic standard 
these days. Since the design works fine in 800x600 I am not too worried.

They are on the left side, because especially in cases of i18n, things 
can get long and if you have horizontal tabs, it really limits how many 
total tabs you can have. If the tabs run vertically and their labels can 
line wrap, then you can have more tabs as the number of tabs grows 
vertically which is pretty much limitless (although of course you don't 
want ridiculous numbers of tabs.)

I've worked on a couple of web apps where the main nav was horizontal 
tabs across the top, and it did cause a lot of problems as we ran out of 
space a few times and had to completely readjust and shuffle things 
around to stick to only the 6-7 items that would fit horizontally across.

> I think the point I'm trying to make is that the overall theme that the 
> applications plug into shouldn't steal the attention or real-estate away from 
> the real use of the page. Does this make sense?

It makes sense, and although I don't agree that they steal attention 
inappropriately, there are ways of toning down the tabs if it does 
become an issue. Fair enough, because these designs haven't been tested 
on users yet. It sounds like your concern is more for the visual 
treatment of the tabs than their placement, and the visual treatment can 
certainly be tweaked somewhat. If you have suggestions let's talk 
through them.

~m