Allegedly it was 20 years ago, today, 13 March, that Tim Berners Lee first dreamed up the idea of the World Wide Web. It wasn't called the W3 back then, but the proposal that was made eventually lead to what we know today.

In the first part in this series we built a very simple tab widget which met the initial requirements, and then was extended with a number of options to increase re-usability in the second part. Amongst the options were a number for events, which I will discuss in this third part. In the options we have specified a number of events. Most of these events are fired by the activator widget and require no interference from us (other than to listen to the changeOn event). However, there are two events that the tabs widget will fire: changing, which is cancellable; and changed.

In the previous part I showed how to build a very basic but functional Tab control that uses Activator internally. While that code certainly works, it's not really a reusable control. It's missing several important features: options, events, a destructor, and downloads, documentation and demos. In this part I will deal with the first of these and also update the demo to show it off. In order to make a widget truly reusable we need to provide a number of options. Just because the standard use-case has anchor tags inside list elements and uses the href to figure out what to show or hide, doesn't mean that it's always going to be like that. Similarly, although my original specification required the tabs to change on mouseover, a normal tabs control changes on click.