Patent ID: 8146010

Claim:
A method in a computing system for combining tabs of a tabbed document interface portion of a display page, the method comprising: providing a tab definition store that defines, for each tab of the tabbed document interface portion, a tab definition that defines one or more sub-tabs of the tab, each sub-tab having a tab name and tab content, the tab content of a sub-tab of a tab being derived from a web page that is augmented with alignment information indicating how to align that tab content with the tab content of another sub-tab of that tab; generating the tabbed document interface portion by, for each tab definition, generating a tab name for that tabbed document interface portion that is derived from the tab names of the sub-tabs of the tab and a tab window of the tabbed document interface portion that combines the tab content of the sub-tabs in accordance with the alignment information of the tab definition; displaying the tabbed document interface portion having the generated tab name and tab window; when a user indicates to split a combined tab, updating the tab definition store to indicate that the sub-tabs of the combined tab have been split; and regenerating and redisplaying the tabbed document interface portion to display the split tabs; and when a user indicates to combine tabs, updating the tab definition store to indicate that the tabs have been combined as sub-tabs of a combined tab; and regenerating and redisplaying the tabbed document interface portion to display the combined tabs.