User blog:JoshuaJSlone/Stupid Tabber Tricks

Working with some big tabbers today, I ran across some strange behavior. While I still think the behavior is strange, I at least figured out what caused it, so it can be controlled somewhat. I also went looking for a good way to force multiple rows in a tabber in a way that looked good, but unfortunately there seems to be no great way. But I still think it's worth sharing the weird behavior and a few possible ways to work around it.

Note: Due to the way infoboxes work they're just going to be piled over on the right side of the page ton top of each other. I'll add a number to their titles and reference which one I'm talking about.

First, here is an extremely shortened version of the infobox for One•Two•Three / The Matenrou Show was it was earlier today (#1).

I rewrote the tabber portion using my Template:OtherCoversTabber, and got this unexpected result--it had stopped going into a second row, and instead widened the infobox. (#2)

At first I thought I'd somehow used tabber differently in the OtherCoversTabber template, but the trick turns out to be: it will only split into a second row if there's a space in the middle of one of the tabber titles. Like so. #3

This kind of sucks because it means one tab is always going to be broken between rows. However, kind of a silly workaround is to use some empty section with a name like ". ." specifically as a way to split up lines, while using no spaces in the rest. Like so. #4

It's still pretty ugly and the first row is partially covered by the second, but at least a small improvement. I considered another way to break things down would be to have tabbers within tabbers. Negatives: Source looks a bit uglier, it might take the reader an extra click to get to any given cover, and some height is added to the infobox. It looks pretty nice, though, so might be a good solution sometimes. #5