babbage's Journal: Browser tabs, Javascript, DOM, and YOU!

Okay, so now that every browser except the 800 pound gorilla officially supports tabs, when are we going to be able to access browser tabs from Javascript? I've got pages where I'm dying to replace every window.open(url) Javascript call with a call equivalent to window.newtab(url). As far as I can tell, Javascript can't do this because support for it hasn't found its way into the DOM. Maybe this is a good thing -- no access may be better than having different implementations for Gecko (Mozilla, Phoenix/Firebird, Camino), KHTML/WebCore (Safari, Konqueror, OmniWeb), Opera, CrazyBrowser (<-- IE wrapper with tab support), etc. However, I think we've reached the point where support for tabs is prevalent enough that web page authors need to have access to the new interface component. And yes, I did search Google before asking: does anyone know how or if we can interact with browser tabs in Javascript?

Tabs don't belong to the DOM

[rickymoz]

That's my opinion. The only thing that one should be able to do is the following:

- tell the browser that all target="anyname" should be opened in a tab instead of a window.

-the tab, like the window, should be named according to the target name

This way, you could talk with Javascript to the tabs you have opened and which name you know. It won't be possible to close any random tab, like it's now not possible to close any random window.

And I think that's a good thing (TM)

Re:Tabs don't belong to the DOM

[babbage]

Okay, that's fine with me. The bigger issue to me isn't that tabs aren't part of the DOM, but that tabs aren't accessible to Javascript. I was (naively?) assuming that to provide access to Javascript the DOM had to be extended, but if that's not the only/best way to do it then that's fine with me.

Honestly, I'm not much of an HTML/Javascript jockey, and I'm not looking to do anything fancy with this. I'm a sysadmin, and I just want to make it so that the web interfaces to some of the things I have to intera

Re:Tabs don't belong to the DOM

[rickymoz]

Ok, I see your point. You are looking for a comfortable UI for some admin application without needing to open lots of windows.

Maybe something like tabs as a part of the website would be a better idea. Then you - or the developper of the application for that matter - would be fully able to control these tabs.

You can read more about these CSS-tabs in this blog [diveintomark.org]. Note that that won't work in any other browser than a recent Mozilla and maybe Safari.