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(For more resources on Yui, see here.)
Q: What is the YUI?
A: The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a toolkit packed full of powerful objects that enables rapid frontend GUI design for richly interactive web-based applications. The utilities provide an advanced layer of functionality and logic to your applications, while the controls are attractive pre-packed objects that we can drop onto a page and begin using with little customization.
Q: Who is it for and who will it benefit the most?
A: The YUI is aimed at and can be used by just about anyone and everyone, from single site hobbyists to creators of the biggest and best web applications around. Developers of any caliber can use as much or as little of it as they like to improve their site and to help with debugging. It’s simple enough to use for those of you that have just a rudimentary working knowledge of JavaScript and the associated web design technologies, but powerful and robust enough to satisfy the needs of the most aspiring and demanding developers amongst you.
Q: How do I install it?
A: The simple answer is that you don’t. Both you, while developing and your users can load the components needed both from Yahoo! CDN and even from Google CDN across the world. The CDN (Content Delivery Network) is what the press nowadays calls ‘the cloud’ thus, your users are more likely to get a better performance loading the library from the CDN than from your own servers. However, if you wish, you can download the whole package either to take a deep look into it or serve it to your users from within your own network. You have to serve the library files yourself if you use SSL.
Q: From where can one download the YUI Library?
A: The YUI Library can be downloaded from the YUI homepage. The link can be found at http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/.
Q: Are there any licensing restrictions for YUI?
A: All of the utilities, controls, and CSS resources that make up the YUI have been publicly released, completely for free, under the open source BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) license. This is a very unrestrictive license in general and is popular amongst the open source community.
Q: Which version should I use?
A: The YUI Library is currently provided in two versions, YUI2 and YUI3. YUI2 is the most stable version and there are no plans to discontinue it. In fact, the YUI Team is working on the 2.9 version, which will be the last major revision of the YUI2 code line and is to be released in the second half of 2011. The rest of this article will mostly refer to the YUI 2.8 release, which is the current one. The YUI3 code line is the newest and is much faster and flexible. It has been redesigned from the ground up with all the experience accumulated over 5 years of development of the YUI2 code line. At this point, it does not have such a complete set of components as the YUI2 version and many of those that do exist are in ‘beta’ status.
If your target release date is towards the end of 2011, YUI3 is a better choice since by then, more components should be out of ‘beta’.
The YUI team has also opened the YUI Gallery to allow for external contributions. YUI3, being more flexible, allows for better integration of third-party components thus, what you might not yet find in the main distribution might be already available from the YUI Gallery.
Q: Does Yahoo! use the YUI Library? Do I get the same one?
A: They certainly do! The YUI Library you get is the very same that Yahoo! uses to power their own web applications and it is all released at the same time. Moreover, if you are in a rush, you can also stay ahead of the releases (at your own risk) by looking at GitHub, which is the main life repository for both YUI versions. You can follow YUI’s development day by day.
Q: How do I get support?
A: The YUI Library has always been one of the best documented libraries available with good users guide and plenty of well explained examples besides the automated API docs. If that is not enough, you can reach the forums, which currently have over 7000 members with many very knowledgeable people amongst them, both from the YUI team and many power users.
Q: What does the core of the YUI library do?
A: What was then known as the ‘browser wars’, with several companies releasing their own set of features on the browsers, left the programming community with a set of incompatible features which made front-end programming a nightmare. The core utilities try to fix these incompatibilities by providing a single standard and predictable API and deal with each browser as needed. The core of the library consists of the following three files:
- YAHOO Global Object: The Global Object sets up the Global YUI namespace and provides other core services to the rest of the utilities and controls. It’s the foundational base of the library and is a dependency for all other library components (except for the CSS tools).
- Dom utilities: The Dom utilities provide a series of convenient methods that make working with the Document Object Model much easier and quicker. It adds useful selection tools, such as those for obtaining elements based on their class instead of an ID, and smoothes out the inconsistencies between different browsers to make interacting with the DOM programmatically a much more agreeable experience.
- Event Utility: The Event Utility provides a unified event model that co-exists peacefully with all of the A-grade browsers in use today and offers a consistent method of accessing the event object. Most of the other utilities and controls also rely heavily upon the Event Utility to function correctly.
Q: What are A-grade browsers?
A: For each release, the YUI Library is thoroughly tested on a variety of browsers. This list of browsers is taken from Yahoo!’s own statistics of visitors to their sites. The YUI Library must work on all browsers with a significant number of users. The A-grade browsers are those that make up the largest share of users.
Fortunately browsers come in ‘families’ (for example, Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari both use the WebKit rendering engine) thus, a positive result in one of them is likely to apply to all of them. Testing in Safari for Mac provides valid results for the Safari on Windows version, which is rarely seen. Those browsers are considered X-Grade, meaning, they haven’t been tested but they are likely to work fine.
Finally, we have the C-grade browsers which are known to be obsolete and nor YUI nor any other library can really be expected to work on them. This policy is called Graded Browser Support and it is updated quarterly. It does not depend on the age of the browser but on its popularity, for example, IE6 is still in the A-grade list because it still has a significant share.
