if you are doing page to page calls, then as far as I know the easier
way to do it is with a hash or query string (blah.html#tab2 or
blah.html?tabSelected=2) Not sure if jquery has a function to parse
the url for parameters, but there are plenty of references online
(search: javascript get query string parameter). So your a href
includes the query string in the url, and the javascript on the tabs
page parses it, and selects the proper tab. This is assuming your menu
and tabs are on separate pages.
