it wouldn't be too difficult to build your own helper plugin that converts the dom of the form to dom acceptable by the tabs plugin. you would just take the form tag, use wrapInner to place a div inside of the form, and save that div to a variable. next, create a ul, then for each fieldset, make a li > a with an href equal to the legend value and text equal to the legend value. inside of that same loop for each fieldset, you wrap each fieldset in a div with an id equal to the legend, resulting in the proper tabs layout. then you simply call .tabs() on the div variable.
turned into a plugin, it could look as simple as
- var $form = $('#person');
- var $div = $.formTabs($form).tabs();
I personally would rather it be in the form of a helper plugin than part of the core plugin because i can't see this being a very common usage for .tabs();.