516295 - TabBox element needs a standard class for bottom-aligned tabs.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Themes, defect)

Description

[Andrew Sachen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Though not often used, some extensions use the bottom-aligned tab class (tabs-bottom and tab-bottom) to draw tabs at the bottom of the tabbox in which the tabs sit. However, the tabbox itself has no such class built in, and therefore is impossible to theme accurately. For example, if a tabpanels element would normally have borders along the bottom, left, and right of the box, and the tabs element draws the top border (using a bottom border), it will make a nice, professional looking box around the tabpanels, allowing the tab elements within the tab element to, for example, have no border below them, giving them a "connected to the content" look. If the tabs are bottom-aligned, however, it's currently impossible to draw the tabpanels element correctly, since it has no connection to the class of its sibling tabs element. I would like, therefore, to suggest that the tabbox or tabpanels element (or both) acquire a standardized class for handling such cases, and that the default theme handle bottom-aligned tabs in an aesthetically correct manner.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install any extension which uses tabs below the content rather than above, such as FireFTP <http://fireftp.mozdev.org/>.
2. View the UI, and observe the tabs. It may help to use a theme which draws tabs in a more correct and connected manner, for example, my In The Dark theme <http://realityripple.com/software/xpi/itd/>.
Actual Results:  
The tabs are drawn almost entirely wrong, despite the existence of a tab-bottom class. Even a theme which correctly draws the tab elements still has the issue of the tabpanels element border being wrong, but it at least has the tabs facing the right direction.

Expected Results:  
Bottom-aligned tabs should appear vertically flipped, as they do in OS and application UIs universally. They're not often used in Firefox, but they're still around.
Tabpanels elements should have a class similar to tabs elements, which will allow theme developers to correctly create these vertically flipped tabboxes.

Comment 1

[Tim Nguyen :ntim]

Sounds like from bug 1483813 we don't want to do this.