Yahoo User Interface
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The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a free collection of utilities and controls, written primarily in JavaScript, that has been produced by the expert developers at Yahoo! to make your life easier as a web developer or front-end user interface designer.
It consists of a series of JavaScript and CSS components that can be used to quickly and easily build the rich and highly interactive applications that today's web consumer expects and demands.
[edit] Installing Yahoo! User Interface
The YUI is not an application in its own right, and it doesn't need to be installed as such. Getting started with the YUI is extremely simple; you first choose whether to download all of the source files from Yahoo and use them locally as part of your web sites' hierarchy, or whether to use the URLs provided on the YUI developer pages to reference the library files stored on Yahoo's web server. These are the exact same files that are used in many different interface implementations across the Yahoo! network and as such can be depended on for being almost continuously available, and even if Yahoo! does decide to take these files down at some point in the future, I'm sure that this will be announced in a timely manner.
Another benefit of using Yahoo's network bandwidth to provide the functionality behind your application is that their network is global in nature, with servers running in many geographically distinct parts of the world. Being able to serve library files from a location closer to your visitors' location results in a better response from your application; this is good news for your visitors and therefore good news for your business.
Additionally, there are different versions of each of the working files in the library including a 'minified' file that has been stripped of whitespace and comment blocks. The Yahoo servers provide these minified versions of the files, but in addition, they also serve the files in a GZIP format, making the files up to 90% smaller and therefore, much more efficient for transportation across the Internet. Finally, Yahoo! also helps the cache hit rates by issuing expires headers with expiration dates set far in the future. But best of all, these benefits are all provided for free.
If you've decided that you want to download the YUI in its entirety, you'll find a link on the YUI home page at http://developer.yahoo.com/ which will lead you to the library's project site at SourceForge.net. SourceForge is renowned as the world's largest open-source software development site and currently host over 100,000 different projects. All you really need from there is the library itself as virtually all of the documentation and useful information resides on the YUI site on the Yahoo! portal.
So as far as installing the library goes, the most that you'll need to do is to download the library to your computer and unpack it to a local directory where you can easily find the files, assets, and resources that you require for your current project, and if you choose to let Yahoo! host the files for you, you won't even need to do that.
[edit] Additional References
- For instructions on Debugging Yahoo User Interface, click here
- For instructions on CSS Tools of Yahoo User Interface, click here
[edit] Source
The source of this content is Chapter 1: Introducing the YUI of Learning the Yahoo! User Interface library by Dan Wellman (Packt Publishing, 2008).
