New concept for platform-specific instructions #474

Now that most of the site has been updated and streamlined, I'd like to take a look at optimizing the platform selection. This is the main sore point for me that makes a user's experience getting started seem non-polished or confusing, so I'm hoping that we can considerably improve it. There are a few parts to this, so see below.

Improve code which populates tabs

We currently have a fairly large code file that takes the HTML that is generated from markdown and converts it to well-formatted tabs with navigation. It also attempts to auto-detect the user's platform and choose that tab by default. While we currently supply a name in the markown that is then used as both the title and the user agent lookup, I'd like to separate the two actions so that we supply a technical name (osx, windows, etc) and it does a lookup to find both the proper text to display and the proper action to take to check the user agent. This means that we can change the titles without changing the markdown and can decouple platform detection from the titles.

Replace traditional tabs with page-level selector

We currently use a tab control to allow the user to select the platform that they want to use. This takes space on the sides, top and bottom and feels more like a "localized option" instead of a "global option". It also means that we have a tab control within the tab control to have different instructions for different versions of the OS (that's where we start losing some considerable space). I want to modify the JS to generate a page-level nav element (shown below), to make it less disruptive lower down on the page. This is what many developer-focused sites do (such as Microsoft's MSDN), and it works pretty well.

Here's a rough screenshot (obviously some styles are messed up in this test):

It'll need a border and a few other bits, but the majority of the styles are supplied by Bootstrap and the code is mostly already there.

Generate valid HTML

The script currently stores data in HTML by adding non-standard attributes to the elements (e.g. <li tab="Windows">). This is technically invalid HTML, as tab isn't an HTML attribute. I plan to change this to use data-* attributes and jQuery's .data(...) utility method to conform to HTML standards,

So, what do you think? Obviously these aren't the biggest changes, but It's always a win to increase usability and maintainability. I figure if I have the hour or two it'll take available I might as well get this fixed.