Using tabs as URL navigation links
The tabs widget isn't limited to populating tab panels using preloaded div elements or by making Ajax calls. Some applications already have many components built, and lots of content to display. If you're updating a site, or application such as this, the tabs widget might be useful as the main form of navigation, especially if you're already using jQuery UI widgets. What we would need then is something generic that could be applied to every page, without much effort on the part of the developer using the widget. Although the tabs widget wasn't designed for such a purpose, we're not going to let that stop us because with a little tweaking, we can create a generic component that gives us exactly what we need.
How to do it...
The first thing we'll look at is the content on one of the pages in our application. The HTML defines both the tabs widget structure and the content displayed under the active tab.
<div id="nav">
<ul>
<li>
...
