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The advantages of this approach are:
- it creates a uniform look-and-feel for all complex windows
- all options are immediately visible, similar to a tabbed window (this is an advantage over the current popdown menu of help topics).
- unlike a tabbed window, this is a simple and straightforward solution that is also available with older Motif/Lesstif versions and doesn't rely on custom widgets[1].
Help window:
Options window:
This is a mockup with a screenshot from Netscape 4.75. The right-hand side doesn't correspond to the selected item in the list and is just to show how framed groups can be used to further structure the contents. The additional heading on the right-hand side would probably need to look different as well.
For details on what the options could contain, see here.
Notes
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Alternatives that I had considered but finally rejected are:
- Customize XmNotebook to look like a tabbed window. Downside: Still kind of ugly, hackish, and only available with Motif >= 2.0.
- Use a free tabbed widget. Downside: Most are ugly and/or buggy.
- Use the Microline widget set (available as part of the Mozilla souce code). The widgets are very nice and efficient. Unfortunately this is not an option since the code is licensed under the NPL, which is incompatible with GPL (according to both RMS and the Netscape NPL FAQ), meaning that GPL and NPL can't be linked together.