Tab

Tab or tabs may refer to:

"Tab(s)", thin or slab-like object(s)

"Tab(s)" in context of table(s), tabular presentation(s), and tabulation

"Tab(s)" as individual word in other senses

Theater drapes and stage curtains

Theater drapes and stage curtains are large pieces of cloth that are designed to mask backstage areas of a theater from spectators. They are designed for a variety of specific purposes and come in several types; many are made from black or other dark colored, light-absorbing material, and heavyweight velour is the current industry standard for these. Theater drapes represent a portion of any production's soft goods, a category which includes any cloth-based element of the stage or scenery (though not including cloth theater costumes or wardrobe).

Proscenium stages use a greater variety of drapes than arena or thrust stages. In proscenium theaters, drapes are typically suspended from battens that are controlled by a fly system (i.e., they are "flown", in theater terminology). When a drape is flown, the task of adjusting its height for best masking effect is simplified and, in the case of a drape that must be moved during a performance, this enables the drape to be quickly raised above the proscenium arch—thus positioning it out of view of spectators—or lowered to any arbitrary height above the stage, as required.

Tab (GUI)

In interface design, a tabbed document interface (TDI) or Tab is a graphical control element that allows multiple documents or panels 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 WordVision DOS word processor for the IBM PC in 1982 was perhaps the first commercially available product with a tabbed interface. PC Magazine in 1994 wrote that it "has served as a free R&D department for the software business—its bones picked over for a decade by programmers looking for so-called new ideas". The NeWS version of UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor was another early product, with 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. 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.