The Yahoo User Interface Library
(YUI) Christian Heilmann | http://wait-till-i.com | http://scriptingenabled.org Web Directions North, Denver, Colorado, February 2009

Let’s take a walk... ...on
the client side

The client side is where
strange things happen.

Browsers render in fascinating and
totally wrong ways.

Random code from dubious sources
interferes with your godlike, clean and high quality code.

...and you fix more than
you develop.

The web is a total
mess!

The reason is that things
seemingly work.

However, you are not the
web and neither is your computer.

To make things work for
Yahoo we needed to find a way to abstract these issues away from us.

And this is why we
built the YUI.

It brings order to the
chaos.

What chaos?

JavaScript is a part of
a larger world. This is not the copyrighted photo you are looking for

Browser Interaction with other technologies
(CSS, Markup) Interaction with other scripts Interaction with the backend

Interaction with the operating system.
Interaction with the user (with unknown ability) Interaction with bad code (a.k.a. ads)

YUI deals with all of
this.

Because it has to –
we built it for industrial (Yahoo) strength.

The first thing we needed
to get are some sensible constraints.

We did this with the
Graded Browser Support: http://developer.yahoo.com/ yui/articles/gbs/

This gave us a defined
playground, and we were able to start tackling the other issues.

The first thing to tackle
before you can even hope to build interfaces are browser differences in CSS.

There is no such thing
as an “unstyled page”.

There is no such thing
as an “unstyled page”.

Good luck working around that
one.

Unless you use reset.css http://developer.yahoo.com/
yui/reset/

Starting with a blank canvas
= good.

What about typography?

Make it work across browsers
with fonts.css http://developer.yahoo.com/ yui/fonts/

Even create layouts with grids.css
http://developer.yahoo.com/ yui/grids/

Grids gives you an amazingly
large amount of options and layout permutations.

YUI comes with a lot
of tools to gain knowledge about what is happening under the hood of your application.

YUI logger gives you a
cross- browser console to show values.

Death to alert()!

You can even include the
logger on the fly with a bookmarklet.

http://blog.rajatpandit.com/sandbox/yuilogger/index.html

If you need even more
control, there is the YUI profiler. http://developer.yahoo.com/ yui/profiler/

And the YUI test framework
for test driven development. http://developer.yahoo.com/ yui/yuitest/

On a code level, YUI
comes out-of-the-box with namespacing.

Which – if used correctly
– keeps large amounts of code readable and maintainable.

YAHOO.lang also comes with a
lot of validation methods to ensure things are what they are.

All in all YUI is
a good choice for large, distributed teams.

Built on agreed standards Separated
into modules each dealing with one task (Core, DOM, Event,Animation, IO...) Constant reporting of what is going on Own debugging environment

YUI is a framework to
build working web applications.

It allows you to create
applications using tested and working widgets that extend what HTML gives us.

Interface Widgets AutoComplete DataTable Button
Layout Calendar Menu Rich Text Charts TabView Container

Everything is fully
documented.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/docs/

And there are almost 300
examples to look at.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/

The controls are driven by
custom events to allow for extending and monitoring them.

All YUI components come as
a debug version which log everything that is going on to the logger.

All in all YUI allows
you to build web interfaces without having to know all the pain that goes on in the browser world.

What does the future hold?

YUI3
http://developer.yahoo.com/
yui/3/

Include on demand Multiple sandboxed
instances in a page Modularity on CSS level (per element reset) Every event is a custom event

Screen reader compatible widgets. Widgets
extendable with plugins Framework (SDK) for own compatible widgets.

The elevator lift pitch YUI
is the system that Yahoo uses to build its web sites. It is constantly tested to work for the largest amount of users, free, open source and covers everything from design patterns to out-of-the-box widgets. It is modular and you can use only what you need. You can either host it yourself or get it from a network of distributed servers.

http://isithackday.com/hacks/delhi/

THANKS! Christian Heilmann http://wait-till-i.com http://scriptingenabled.org
http://twitter.com/codepo8