Tabs destroy normal lists

[Robotic-Brain]

While developing for Typo3 I noticed that any list with <ul> inside a "tabbed div" is converted to tabs even though it shouldn't. The documentation states ​http://api.jqueryui.com/tabs/:

The tabs themselves must be in either an ordered (<ol>) or unordered (<ul>) list
Each tab "title" must be inside of a list item (<li>) and wrapped by an anchor (<a>) with an href attribute

however this gets converted to tabs when calling $("#someCustomTabs").tabs();:

<div id="someCustomTabs">
	<ul>
		<li>Test1</li>
		<li>Test2</li>
		<li>Test3</li>
	</ul>
</div>

even multiple levels below as seen in the Typo3 backend.

[Scott González]

I'm not sure why you would do that. Can you provide a scenario where it's sane to call .tabs() and not expect tabs to be created? If so, please provide a reduced test case in jsFiddle or jsbin.

[Robotic-Brain]

The scenario i encountered this in was in an update script for a typo3 extension I'm not sure why they call .tabs() there but it affects my code (several levels down the hierarchy) in an unpleasant way (maybe i should file a bug there too)

however it does not matter in this case: if there is no anchor with a href it should be ignored since a tab without content makes no sense

consider this example: ​http://jsbin.com/keloliyu/1/edit?html,output

of course you could call this poor design but i have no control over that :(

[Scott González]

This is working as intended, tabs always use the first descendant list by default. I don't think we want to complicate the search for the list, especially since it's customizable though the ​_getList() extension point and very few people run into this problem.

[Robotic-Brain]

Then it really is a Typo3 bug...
For reference: ​http://forge.typo3.org/issues/58697