

YUI Library relaunches with snappy UI - jontsai
http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2011/08/15/yui-open-hours-thurs-august-18th/

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zmmmmm
To the YUI team -

First - thank you for your amazing work. I've put YUI to use in many projects.

Second - tiny bit of feedback about yuilibrary.com - I know you have your own
CDN but can we have back a "Download" button? I hate it when I have to search
for 5 minutes to find out how to download something. It really makes me feel
like the whole project is going to be a pain in the ass when even downloading
it is hard.

~~~
rgrove
We wanted to emphasize the CDN over downloads, but we clearly hid the download
links too well.

I've added a "Downloads" link to the "Quick Start" dropdown menu in the top
nav bar, and we'll give some thought to adding a more prominent link somewhere
on the front page. Thanks for the feedback!

~~~
oinksoft
It still fails the <C-F> test...and <C-F>download is the first thing I do when
I decide that I'd like to try out some library. Nothing wrong with preferring
a CDN, but some people want to get the whole thing broken into source files so
they can really audit the code properly.

Others also want to host their own because they don't want to introduce
another point of failure. For all the supposed reliability of CDN host X,
having YUI available when my own CDN goes down isn't helping me much. On the
other hand, if YUI goes kaput while my CDN is doing fine, I've got some
problems.

~~~
drgath
Don't get me wrong, I 100% agree that sites should be allowed to host their
own version of YUI because there are some circumstances where it may be
necessary. That's why we distribute all the source code to be able to do it.
But also keep in mind this is the Yahoo CDN, if it goes down, all of Yahoo
goes down. I can't say the CDN won't ever go down, but to my knowledge, it has
never happened.

If you are concerned about CDN reliability, for optimal performance I would
still use the Yahoo CDN as you get all the benefits of combo-handling, edge-
caching, and (soon) server-side dependency calculation. And as a backup, host
on your own CDN in the unlikely event Yahoo's CDN goes down.

We'll look into passing the <C-F> test. :)

~~~
Jach
Maybe I'm just weird, but I frequently develop things offline and so I require
a local copy of things for dev anyway regardless of if I use the CDN in
production or not.

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gord
Site looks better. +1 for [Download] button.

I use YUI mainly for table/grid widget - I preferred API design in YUI3 but
found various table UI bugs when I 'mixed in' sortable and resize columns
etc... This meant I had to go back to YUI2. I remember this experience as
amorphic 'yui pain'.

Hopefully in current/3.4 the DataGrid is now fixed with official plugins
working in unison?

Some thoughts :

YUI really needs one core person with an iron fist and a clear goal driving it
forward. It feels like it has the guts of something incredibly useful, but is
being pulled in too many directions.

In a large company its tempting to think ' we better keep that for Sandras or
Simons team' .. dont do that... think like a startup and throw bad shit away
:]

I can live with the verboseness if the Widgets are really nice - and thats a
way to get HTML5/js/web-startup developers thinking about Yahoo again.

Some ideas -

Be ambitious upstarts, dont ask permission to kickass.

Give the team autonomy / ie. a virtual startup within Yahoo. Maybe split off a
team or an Open Source startup ?

Demand all Yahoo use latest YUI by religious edict from on high [ Doug ? ]

Consider mobile?

Drop the legacy crud, get rid of any fallbacks, burn the bridges!

One Unified example, or a framework / app-designer as the canonical YUI demo

~~~
drgath
Gord, thanks for the comments. Very much appreciated. Here are some of my
thoughts...

> "Give the team autonomy / ie. a virtual startup within Yahoo. Maybe split
> off a team or an Open Source startup ?"

Everyone involved with the project, from upper management on down, are all
engineers, and by having Yahoo entirely fund the YUI project it allows each of
us to focus on nothing but building things for our community. If we were spun
off, then we have to worry about making money, and well... I'd rather be
coding. Even as a spin-off, if Yahoo (and others?) funded us 100%, I don't
think much would change compared to how we currently operate. In my opinion,
Yahoo is the best customer (and parent) a JavaScript library could ask for.

> "Demand all Yahoo use latest YUI by religious edict from on high"

When you hear the execs publicly talk about replacing old infrastructure
components, upgrading everyone from YUI2 to YUI3 was one of those things we've
been working on heavily. Flickr, Mail, and the Homepage are all on YUI 3.3.0+.
By the end of 2011, all Y! Media properties will be on a recent version as
well. That means the vast majority of the 80+ billion pageviews/month will be
using a current YUI3 release. Maybe not bleeding edge, but close enough. YUI2
is deprecated and will only be receiving security fixes, if any ever arise.

> "Consider mobile?"

It's very much on our minds. It currently works great in mobile because of the
efficient codebase, modular architecture, and the combohandler, but we're
working on filling in some of the missing pieces. Stay tuned.

> "One Unified example, or a framework / app-designer as the canonical YUI
> demo"

We had a long-discussion about that very topic today. Now that we're on a new,
self-hosted website, it opens up many possibilities for what we can do to
really show off the library.

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quinndupont
All of a sudden with all of rgrove's (YUI's) interaction, it makes me feel all
warm and fuzzy about using YUI again. Great customer service _does_ make a
difference.

~~~
drgath
Join us for a YUI Open Hours sometime. We do them every few weeks and you can
learn about all the latest stuff we're working on. Follow @yuilibrary on
Twitter for updates.

You can also follow us all on Github and see everything we're doing on a daily
basis. <http://github.com/yui/>

A goal of our team is to be as transparent as possible and open source
everything we create. I guess the only things not public are our internal
mailing list and weekly meeting, and those are pretty boring. :)

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digamber_kamat
While YUI is probably one of the best JS frameworks around the sloppy design
of their webpage beats me. the yuilibrary.com looks so 90ish in its design.

~~~
rgrove
What parts of it strike you as sloppy? How would you improve the design? We'd
love to hear specific feedback.

We're admittedly programmers and not designers. Our main focus for the
redesign was to improve usability, remove clutter, and decrease the overhead
involved in finding relevant content. The new user guides and API docs in
particular got the most attention in this regard, and I'm pretty happy with
the result. It's not super sexy, but it sure is usable.

~~~
kellysutton
I'll chime in here, just in terms of the design of yuilibrary.com

* Use a fixed-width site. Most people go for something like 960px. * Establish horizontal and vertical eyelines or columns. * If you're on Github, might as well use gists. Offer example projects as open projects on Github

~~~
catch23
+1 on the fixed width. I'm a developer, so I have a big monitor -- it's hard
for my eye to follow sections of the document without lined up elements.

~~~
rgrove
Great feedback, everyone. I've pushed a few quick changes to address the low-
hanging fruit:

\- We're now using Maven Pro for headings (no more Trebuchet).

\- Replaced Lucida Grande with Helvetica in the nav bar (sorry Windows users,
you get Arial).

\- The site now has a max width of 1200px instead of expanding infinitely.
This seems like a reasonable compromise, since any purely fixed-width design
draws the ire of people who hate fixed-width designs.

Keep the feedback coming!

~~~
hobonumber1
Wow, that was fast.

~~~
rgrove
One other nice thing about our new site is that it's super easy for us to push
changes. :)

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rch
Does YUI have anything along the lines of extjs' tree grid[1]? Or possibly a
road-map with a pertinent entry?

[1]
[http://dev.sencha.com/deploy/ext-4.0.2a/examples/tree/treegr...](http://dev.sencha.com/deploy/ext-4.0.2a/examples/tree/treegrid.html)

~~~
ajtaylor
That is a great control. Which reminds me that I should go back and re-examine
extjs for an internal app I'm building at work. Thanks!

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mikeleeorg
I know it's really not that hard to copy & paste it, or just type it in, but
I'm a little surprised that this blog post didn't have "yuilibrary.com" as a
simple link to itself. For usability, SEO and all.

~~~
rgrove
The actual reason is that this blog post was posted _before_ the site went
live, and was not the post-launch announcement (which did have a link). I've
updated it with a link.

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WayneDB
Why is it that all HTML based widget sets have crummy keyboard support
compared to their native desktop counterparts?

~~~
rgrove
Is there a specific YUI widget you're unhappy with?

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WayneDB
In the Widgets section of the complete YUI Examples page [1], the only
component that seems to support the keyboard at all is the Dial widget. The
Calendar, DataTable, MenuNav, Slider and TabView don't seem to have the
default keyboard-ability that their desktop equivalents do.

[1] <http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/examples/>

~~~
rgrove
Of the components you named, MenuNav and TabView both have keyboard support.
Did you try using the arrow keys?

I agree that the keyboard support for Slider and Calendar could be improved.

You didn't mention AutoComplete, which also has excellent keyboard support.

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hunvreus
Is that just me or the Todo app example
(<http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/app/app-todo.html>) was scraped from
Backbone's examples
([http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/examples/todos/inde...](http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/examples/todos/index.html))?

~~~
rgrove
It's very intentionally based on Backbone's example, to demonstrate the
similarities and differences between Backbone and the YUI App Framework. It's
kind of a tradition now among MVC frameworks.

~~~
hunvreus
Alright; I did not know that. Very neat indeed; I hadn't looked into YUI for
ages but it seems pretty solid, especially if it integrates MVC concepts. Was
it in previous versions of YUI or was it added recently?

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andyford
Whooo! Thank goodness!!! We needed more YUI URLs!

~~~
rgrove
Your sarcasm is misplaced. The new website consolidates all the YUI 3 user
guides, examples, and API docs -- as well as YUI Theater and various other
content that used to be spread around developer.yahoo.com -- under the
yuilibrary.com website.

The new website means there's now just one URL you need to remember:
<http://yuilibrary.com/>.

