Generating tabs with jquery and css

I am trying to make something like the bar at the bottom of GMail or Facebook's chat window. I am NOT trying to make a chat service or anything in that like.

In facebook's chat, when you click a friend, a rectangular block thingy f开发者_JAVA百科orms at the bottom of the visible page and has your friends name on it as well as the chat history.

I was wondering hwo you can make it so that if u have a list, you can click each of those and generate tabs with the respective information of what you clicked at the bottom of your page?

Would I have to generate the tabs 1st for each one and then set display:none and then when I want to generate a tab, use [please forgive the poor syntax below]

$(##tab attribute##).click(function {
        ##selected tab##.show()
     }
 )

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If I understand you correctly... You don't have to create the tabs as you can create them on the fly. Have a look at this jsfiddle for a trivial implementation.

EDIT

Updating with detail, as per AlienWebguy's suggestion:

First, create your ordered list of links and a container for your tabs. Each link has a unique id:

html:

<!-- links to contacts or whatever -->
<ul id="chat-links">
    <li><a id="foo" href="#">foo</a></li>
    <li><a id="bar" href="#">bar</a></li>
    <li><a id="baz" href="#">baz</a></li>
</ul>

<!-- container for your tabs -->
<div id="chat-stage"></div>

Then, create a click event for each link. Each click event will create a personalised message inside a 'chat-window' div:

jQuery:

// click event
$('#chat-links a').click(function() {
    // personalised message
    var str = "Hi, " + this.id + ", what's up?";
    // append a new div to your tab container
    $('#chat-stage').append('<div class="chat-window">' + str + '</div>');
});

Then style the elements:

css:

#chat-stage
{
    position: absolute;
    bottom: 0px;  
}

.chat-window
{
    border: 1px solid #ccc;
    height: 100px;
    float: left;
    margin-right: 8px;
    padding: 8px;
    width: 100px;  
}

As I mentioned this is a pretty trivial implemetation. For instance, this will allow you to click on the same link several times and open a new tab for each click event. You could amend the click event to deal with this; e.g: generate an id for each div and do a conditional. You might also want to minimise, or remove other tabs when opening a new tab. Again, your implementation depends on what you want to do; in the latter case you could add $('#chat-stage').empty(); to the first line of your click event.

Hope this helps :)