SchoolTool Style Guide

Tabs

The row of large links across the top of each page are meant to be rendered as tabs, although it might be a while before we get around to coding the logic to keep track of which tabs is active.

The tabs roughly correspond to “applications,” plus tabs needed for SchoolTool’s navigation and housekeeping, like “Home” and tabs for years. Ultimately there is no strongly defined conceptual explanation of what does and does not belong in a tab, but it is worked out as a compromise between practical constraints:

• The overall number of tabs in a SchoolTool installation should be kept low, in particular you want it to fit in one row in a standard browser window.
• Tabs will often correspond to software packages, but some packages may need more than one tab, or none.
• Tabs are nouns. We should have more verb (task) oriented links in other parts of SchoolTool, like the home page or dashboard.
• The most important thing is that the tabs make sense to users.