Comments on: Yahoo! For Sale: Will Developers Be Left Behind?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 20:41:20 +0000

My impression exactly. Google came up with a nifty way to do AJAX that only required knowledge of Java and MS wants everything done in .asp and .net. Yahoo is the middle ground and would be a tragic loss.

By: Louistar

Louistar — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:19:55 +0000

Interestingly, if you do a W3C validation check on yahoo.com, it says “no doctype found”.

By: olkainflex

olkainflex — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:31:59 +0000

The Open Source community could take over all the efforts made uner the YDN umbrela

By: amessinger

amessinger — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:57:07 +0000

tfurry wrote:

I suppose all things have their day, but it sure seems like in 50 years or so there will only be One World Corporation that owns everything, and everyone will work for them and any fresh ideas will be held captive by IP agreements to be squeezed into whatever profit can be milked from them.

Interestingly enough, this is one of the core themes of the new Pixar movie WALL-E. At the time the film is set, Earth has been taken over — then abandoned — by a giant corporation named Buy ‘n Large.

If you search for the name, you’ll find a fake company website that cleverly spoofs corporate control and rampant global consumerism. The site is built entirely in Flash, which just makes it more evil. :-)

By: tfurry

tfurry — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:44:00 +0000

Kevin, you named the reason why I was troubled by the announcement…I knew something was bothering me about it. I’ve just started working through Yahoo’s dev stuff and incorporating YUI into my applications. I have a strong feeling that developer-oriented openness will get sucked into a black hole if Yahoo is bought by anyone.

I suppose all things have their day, but it sure seems like in 50 years or so there will only be One World Corporation that owns everything, and everyone will work for them and any fresh ideas will be held captive by IP agreements to be squeezed into whatever profit can be milked from them.

By: cranial-bore

cranial-bore — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 13:52:46 +0000

McKenna – if Google were trying to minimize the size of their code why would they have so much CSS, Javascript and font tags directly in the document source? Most of these things should be in cached external files, and the HTML its self could also be leaner. This would EASILY counteract the extra weight of a Doctype.

By: McKenna

McKenna — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 12:48:35 +0000

Great timing on this. I actually have $50 billion handy and have been wondering what to do with it.

In relation to Google not serving a Doctype, I think it’s solely a case of saving the bandwidth that having one there would generate. If you want to make your page as fast as possible, then removing any code that isn’t required for the page to just work is the way to go. Every little bit counts (excuse the pun :P).

By: NicH

NicH — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 10:29:19 +0000

I also find the Google comment a bit bizarre. What’s got the doctype (or lack of) to do with what they have done for the development community?

As mentioned above, Google offers many well maintained APIs and has done lots of very useful niche stuff for Open Source projects via Summer of Code, although these might not be as “glamorous” as a spiffy (albeit bloated) JS interface library.

I also hope Yahoo! doesn’t get aquired by anyone, they’ve done a lot of great stuff over the past few years…but I guess it’s up to the shareholders now…meh….

By: Angajala Kiran Kumar

Angajala Kiran Kumar — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 04:36:12 +0000

Now google search engine is excellent,but yahoo has it own style.Dont compare with these to web developers.They have unique identification.Yahoo took excellent Decision against to Microsoft.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:48:21 +0000

I’m glad to see I’m not the only reader that finds this rant biased and one-sided. Yahoo! offers a valid contribution to the web community, but to say Google and especially Microsoft don’t contribute countless innovations is just ridiculous.