In the area of graphical user interfaces (GUI), a tabbed document interface (TDI) or a Tab is one that allows multiple documents to be contained within a single window, using tabs as a navigational widget for switching between sets of documents. It is an interface style most commonly associated with web browsers, web applications, text editors, and preference panes.
GUI tabs are modeled after traditional card tabs inserted in paper files or card indexes (in keeping with the desktop metaphor).
The name TDI implies similarity to the Microsoft Windows standards for multiple document interfaces (MDI) and single document interfaces (SDI), but TDI does not form part of the Microsoft Windows User Interface Guidelines.
History
The NeWS version of UniPress 's Gosling Emacs text editor was the first commercially available product to pioneer the use of multiple tabbed windows in 1988. It was used to develop an authoring tool for the Ben Shneiderman 's HyperTIES browser (the NeWS workstation version of The Interactive Encyclopedia System), in 1988.[2][3] HyperTIES also supported pie menus for managing windows and browsing hypermedia documents with PostScript applets. Don Hopkins developed and released several versions of tabbed window frames for the NeWS window system as free software, which the window manager applied to all NeWS applications, and enabled users to drag the tabs around to any edge of the window.[4]
HyperTIES was a "hypermedia" browser, a term first used by Ted Nelson in 1965. The first "web" browser came out later in 1990,[5]and the term "World Wide Web" was not invented until 1990.[6]
Four years later, in 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser. That same year, a text editor called UltraEdit also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by a number of others like IBrowse in
Links: * KWin - KDE SC 's default window manager, since KDE 4.4 * Pie Menu Tab Window Manager for The NeWS Toolkit 2.0 (1991) On April 18, 2007, the intellectual property agency IP Innovation LLC and its parent Technology Licensing Corporation filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc. regarding its infringement upon a US Patent originally filed by Xerox researchers in 1987.