Link to tab, get bottom of page

[Erin Paseka]

Who's the expert on WDN tab behavior these days? I'm seeing that clicking a link to a particular tab from another page or an email sometimes causes the browser to display the correct tab but scroll to the bottom of the page, so user-friendliness takes a hit.

For most pages, it seems, linking to a tab makes it scroll to the bottom in FF 3.6 & 7 and Chrome 15 but scroll to just below the tabs in IE 7 & 8. (These observations are all via Windows--some Vista & some 7.) Examples:
http://www.unl.edu/summerprogram/apply.shtml#qs
http://www.unl.edu/summerprogram/research.shtml#nano
http://www.unl.edu/gradstudies/prospective/#balance

But I also have pages that scroll to just below the tabs in all those browsers. Examples:
http://www.unl.edu/gradstudies/prospect ... ranscripts (scrolls somewhat lower in IE 8 )
http://www.unl.edu/mcnair/current.shtml#master (scrolls somewhat lower in FF 7)

Is there something I could/should be doing to make *all* my WDN tabs not scroll to the bottom? (Other than change them all to my "tabs but different pages" model like http://www.unl.edu/gradstudies/current/ ... ters.shtml ?)

[kabel2]

A brief technical explanation of the issue:
A browser's default behavior when opening a page with a hash (the part of the URL after the "#"), is to instantly scroll that part of the page (identified by the element with the matching ID). The problem is this browser behavior occurs before the tabs are rendered/displayed. That is, the page is scrolled to the position of the tab content before all the other tab content regions are hidden. This means that the page is often scrolled to the bottom once the other tab regions are hidden.

To "fix" this the tabs javascript will probably need to be updated to better handle the initial page load with a tab hash. I have submitted your issue to our current issue tracker on GitHub at https://github.com/unl/wdntemplates/issues/166

Hopefully someone will find some time to correct this behavior.

[Erin Paseka]

It's been more than 6 months... has anybody had a chance to look into this?

I've used tabs a lot on my sites because they seemed like an intuitive way to present related pieces of content, a happy medium between separate pages and displaying as one long page. But coworkers continue to (re)report this "jump to bottom" bug to me, getting increasingly agitated that it's still there month after month, enough that I might have to jump ship and redo all those pages without tabs. The bug makes us take a pretty big hit in terms of user experience and looking like we know what we're doing. We're trying to recruit students, among other things.

I would really, really appreciate it if somebody could fix this bug so we can continue using tabs.

Some current examples:
http://www.unl.edu/gradstudies/prospect ... egree_intl
http://www.unl.edu/gradstudies/prospect ... al#english
http://www.unl.edu/gradstudies/prospect ... sibilities

[kabel2]

This feature request has been submitted for review at the GitHub URL mentioned earlier. If accepted, it will likely be "rolled out" with the next code release before the July WDN Meeting.

--BEGINNING PERSONAL RANT (not the opinions of my employer)--
I apologize if the speed at which it was completed seems unsatisfactory. However, I'll remind everyone that no unit is paid to develop template code on a daily basis. We (the UNL community) rely on the development availability of all developers to provide contributions that push the codebase forward.

It almost seems like personal attacks when phrases like

[...] makes us take a pretty big hit in terms of user experience and looking like we know what we're doing. We're trying to recruit students, among other things.

are used. We all understand the goals of the university and strive to achieve them. Not everyone my have the "technical" know-how to make websites work exactly as most users desire. However, web developers are provided with a multitude of choices regarding how to solve these user-interface/experience shortcomings.

[Erin Paseka]

Thanks very much for the update and the candid addendum.

I apologize if I've sounded harsh. Believe me, I understand the feeling of never having enough FTE to go around. From my perspective though, a feature was offered, I utilized it widely, an update halfway broke it, and then nobody had time to fix it or even ability/willingness to tell me whether it would ever be fixed. Dependency was invited and then not supported, which kinda freaks me out. Last I looked, GitHub showed that this was established as an issue in January but then (as far as I can tell) ignored ever since. Some things get fixed so quickly. Had I known in December that this would still be broken in June, I'd have bailed on tabs immediately.

When I say brokenness makes us look bad, that's just me expressing PR-type fears as a major motivation for continuing to bug people about a bug. If my office sends prospective students a link and they get dumped to the bottom of the tab (or any other inconvenient, obviously unintended behavior) they're going to think something along the lines of "Geez, these dopes [at UNL or in Grad Studies in particular] can't even make a working web page." They're likely discounting UNL or my office as a whole, not thinking specifically about us web people who could've (in our different ways/roles) done something about it, not conscious of the hundred other more complicated components of the page that worked perfectly. For better or worse we're all taken for granted and all in this together.