Minitab Mania

There's been a lot of articles and demos on minitabs recently. Minitabs are a subtle and easy to modify type of navigation list that can either be floated or centered based on your design needs. Web graphics has a great article on Inline Minitabs and a follow up titled Float Minitabs. each article is linked to demo pages for easy reference.

The origin of the mini-tab dates from 2003 and a post by Dan Cedarholm at Simple Bits. Here's a link to his original post and an additional article detailing Mini-Tabs with Background Images.

One problem with the inline non-floated lists is that IE 5 won't show the bottom borders on your links. One possible solution to that is to give your links a height of 1em, though this moves them outside the UL element. I suppose it's possible (or inevitable!) that there are other complications as well...

A more complex example is the Flyout Minitabs from Aplus Moments. Pretty sweet.