Warming up to Yahoo! UI

Kevin’s written a couple or times on Yahoo!’s User Interface Library. With endless new DHTML and AJAX libraries and frameworks being released every week, you could be forgiven for being less-than-excited by yet another.

But scanning the slides of Simon’s XTech talk (PDF here) and, in particular, looking at what they’ve done with their Grid CSS stuff (which seems like a major breakthrough for those, like me, that struggle with CSS layouts), finding myself getting really interested. The impression from scanning the code and examples Simon provides in his talk is they’ve really managed to strike the balance between doing too much and too little – that yui has has genuine value but remains “low fat”.

Think there’s also an interesting story here about the development team that put yui together. In some areas Yahoo! seems to be fumbling the ball and while reading Jeremy’s blog, get the impression of a company being sucked dry by middle management. Despite that, the yui team do seem to have pulled off something pretty impressive – some reading on them here as well as an interview with Thomas Sha (the lead) here.

Anyway – only just starting to experiment / climb the learning curve so no real experiences to offer but if anyone (not employed by Yahoo!) has any notes to share, would be great to hear it.