[OT] Tab design (Re: Hack to add "OmniWeb" tabs and Workspaces to Safari)

[Yosuke Arai]

This is off topic:

One thing I don't like about Safari design is the spatial arrangement 
of tabs. The frontmost tab is unified with the toolbar, and the 
background tabs are behind the frontmost tab and the toolbar. And the 
frontmost tab is separated from the toolbar once it's background. This 
causes spatial contradiction - reminds me of the famous Escher's 
staircase.
http://www.cmth.ph.ic.ac.uk/people/ole.peters/escher.html
Also, in Safari, tabs belong to the toolbar, not the browser screen. 
This is also strange.

As long as tabs are above the browser screen, this spatial 
contradiction is inevitable, because you have spatial positioning 
between tabs but the toolbar and the browser screen are on the same 
surface level.
In this respect, I believe OW tab design has the most natural (and 
elegant) way of implementation. You can clearly see which tab is 
frontmost and which are background, and yet there's no spatial 
contradiction at all.

> I can see from using this how wrong I was when I suggested taking 
> tabs from the drawer into a splitview. The tabs in this seem 
> claustrophobic, and restricted somehow. I realise the drawer is the 
> right container for OW's tabs.

I agree. John, your feeling may come from the fact that there's spatial 
contradiction in ordinary tabs but not in SafariStand tabs. This is 
truly confusing, as you can't collapse ordinary tabs when showing 
SafariStand tabs. (It's not Hetima's fault, of course.) 

Switching tabs should be like switching TV channels. OW tab design is 
truly metaphoric to this concept, I believe.

Yosuke Arai