
The accordion is a
graphical control element
A graphical widget (also graphical control element or control) in a graphical user interface is an element of interaction, such as a button or a scroll bar. Controls are software components that a computer user interacts with through direct m ...
comprising a vertically stacked list of items, such as labels or
thumbnail
Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures or videos, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words. In the age of digital images, visual search engines and image-o ...
s. Each item can be "expanded" or "collapsed" to reveal the content associated with that item. There can be zero expanded items, exactly one, or more than one item expanded at a time, depending on the configuration.
The term stems from the musical
accordion
Accordions (from 19th-century German language, German ', from '—"musical chord, concord of sounds") are a family of box-shaped musical instruments of the bellows-driven free reed aerophone type (producing sound as air flows past a Reed (mou ...
in which sections of the bellows can be expanded by pulling outward.
A common example of an accordion is the Show/Hide
operation
Operation or Operations may refer to:
Arts, entertainment and media
* ''Operation'' (game), a battery-operated board game that challenges dexterity
* Operation (music), a term used in musical set theory
* ''Operations'' (magazine), Multi-Man ...
of a box region, but extended to have multiple sections in a list.
An accordion is similar in purpose to a
tabbed interface, a list of items where exactly one item is expanded into a
panel (i.e. list items are
shortcut
Shortcut may refer to:
Navigation
* Rat running or shortcut, a minor-road alternative to a signposted route
* File shortcut, a handle which allows the user to find a file or resource located in a different directory or folder on a computer
* Key ...
s to access separate panels).
User definition
Several windows are stacked on each other. All of them are "
shaded", so only their captions are visible. If one of them is clicked, to make it active, it is "unshaded" or "maximized". Other windows in accordion are displaced around top or bottom edge.
Examples
A common example using a GUI accordion is the Show/Hide operation of a box region, but extended to have multiple sections in a list.
SlideVerse is an accordion interface providing access to web content.
The list view of
Google Reader
Google Reader was an RSS/Atom feed aggregator operated by Google. It was created in early 2005 by Google engineer Chris Wetherell and launched on October 7, 2005, through Google Labs. Google Reader grew in popularity to support a number of pr ...
also features this.
In an early example, Apple's download page used roll-over accordions in 2008. In this example, captured in the
Wayback Machine
The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Launched for public access in 2001, the service allows users to go "back in ...
in the
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
, the left column of the page includes three categories that expand on roll-over: "All Downloads", "Top Apple Downloads", and "Top Downloads".
See also
*
Code folding
Code or text folding, or less commonly holophrasting, is a feature of some graphical user interfaces that allows the user to selectively hide ("fold") or display ("unfold") parts of a document. This allows the user to manage large amounts of text ...
, a similar technique applied to text
References
External links
jQuery UI accordion widgetmootoolsTutorial (where the effect is called ''sliding shelf'') o
MONFXDemo of an accordion script
{{DEFAULTSORT:Accordion (Gui)
Graphical user interface elements
Graphical control elements