Adaptive Web Design is my topic of the day, with my RSS reader bringing me two articles on this theme: Responsive Layouts Using CSS Media Queries, by Kyle Schaeffer, and Now You See Me by Aaron Gustafson.

I am sure the Easy Tabs have a role to play in responsive layout, but today I’ll focus on the second article.

In this excerpt from his book, Aaron compares various methods to show and hide content – a standard pattern nowadays with tabbed interfaces, accordions and other widgets.

This gives me an opportunity to point out one of the changes I made to the Easy Tabs last year. In version 5, the show/hide behavior is now included in a stylesheet, in a class called “et-offscreen”. And the method I use is the one recommended by Aaron Gustafson: instead of changing the display to “none”, move the content off-screen. This way, users don’t see it anymore, but assistive technologies can still access it.

As we’re talking Web design, I should also mention that the Easy Tabs follow the progressive enhancement approach.

If you are not familiar with CSS, this post may just be as clear as mud. But the bottom line is that by adhering to the principles of accessibility and progressive enhancement, the Easy Tabs v5 are currently a solid solution to build tabbed interfaces.