YUI-ext

The opinion here is that Jack Slocum’s YUI-ext is a direct response to the horde of dojo.Widget objects. YUI itself is a direct response to Scriptaculous and MoochiKit. My YUI remarks:

• YUI takes care of cross-browser event wiring.

• YUI defines a browser-agnostic event object (for event callback functions).

• Some YUI patterns appear to depend on specific id names for elements. Requiring a specific class name is uncomfortable enough…

• The talks by Yahoo!™ JavaScript Architect Douglas Crockford were some of the best summarizing and comprehensive presentations about Web technology seen and heard by me. This impressed me and influenced my decision to use the YUI library.

• Matt Sweeney of Yahoo!™ promotes a great term “progressive enhancement” (the opposite of “graceful degradation”) in his talk. This changes my position from degradation to enhancement. I can see these design goals in YUI—yet another attraction to this library.

• I’m not sold on the Yahoo!™ preference for HTML 4.0 over XHTML.

• I’m still evaluating Crockford’s “Code Conventions for the JavaScript Programming Language” against patterns developed over time at SonghaySystem.com. So far, it’s clear to drop “browser sniffing” (because “browsers lie”) and there are scriptable memory leaks in Internet Explorer 6 (because of orphaned events). And also, the use of alert() with AJaX is not productive because alert() stops the single script thread cold.

• A new article at yuiblog.com, “JavaScript, We Hardly new Ya,” finally explains to me what rico-philes were doing over a year ago (that {} syntax among other patterns). This view of JavaScript is very different from the gospel of Danny Goodman of years past.With these remarks in place, now we can shoot out at YUI-ext:

• The YUI-ext TabPanel component is appreciated by me today. It is truly an extension of YUI.

• The YUI-ext Grid component was a problem challenge for Slocum. He admits this in his interview with Yahoo!™. It is a problem for me because it needs attributes that are not part of any HTML/XHTML specification. Not comforting. Matt Sweeney of Yahoo!™ says “don’t invent your own markup… [the same] goes for attributes.”

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