Enable fine-grained opt-in for content.tabs.link

[chiphogg]

My goal is to be able to turn on content tab linking, but only for specific tabs. If I turn it on universally, I find I get linking in all kinds of undesired places.

This was tangentially discussed in #3982. One suggestion was to provide a syntax similar to the fine-grained opt-in for annotations on code blocks: say, === "title" {.link}. I got the impression that this would be difficult or impossible to get working without breaking things.

An alternative might be to put the linked tabs in the config file. This plays more nicely with their status as persistent global links across the site (which I understand is the case). So we could have something like:

theme:
  features:
    - content.tabs.link:
      tabs_to_link:
        - clang14
        - gcc10

(I'm pretty shaky on my YAML syntax, but I hope that gives the general idea.)

With this feature, when a tab is clicked, instead of always linking, it would first be checked against the global allowlist defined above.

Detailed example:

To add some more colour: I'm building a doc site for a potentially open source C++ project.

One page is a "troubleshooting" page, which has examples of the most common compiler errors, and explanations of what they mean. It's a long page, intended to let users Ctrl-F and enter some key pieces of an actual compiler error they encounter. I would like to have a tab for each compiler: say, one for clang14, one for gcc10, etc. These are much better when linked: the user can select their preferred compiler, and all examples will switch simultaneously, hiding examples the user does not care about.

Another series of pages is the "tutorial" pages. These have a bunch of Problem / Solution tabs. I really don't want these to be linked, because selecting the first solution will mean that the solution for the next one is automatically shown, rather than the problem.

[squidfunk]

Thanks for the feature suggestion, but I think it impacts only a handful of users. Let's let it sit here for a while and see if others might find it useful. However, IMHO, it might appear rather unpredictable to the user which tabs will link and which not. Since this is a request on a feature that is part of the community edition, forking and adjusting the relevant logic is always an option.

[chiphogg]

That's a good point about the unpredictability; I hadn't thought of that.

Maybe there's another way, where we could turn on linking at the file level? I don't know if there's any precedent for any kind of per file setting in mkdocs.

[squidfunk]

There's currently no option to do so, as it would need to be integrated with instant loading, which is another problem. It might be possible, and I'm currently thinking about how to allow to switch off certain features for certain pages, but that's a huge problem given how many features and combinations of features Material for MkDocs has.