Comment by gord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gord | Hacker News Reader

Site looks better. +1 for [Download] button.

I use YUI mainly for table/grid widget - I preferred API design in YUI3 but found various table UI bugs when I 'mixed in' sortable and resize columns etc... This meant I had to go back to YUI2. I remember this experience as amorphic 'yui pain'.

Hopefully in current/3.4 the DataGrid is now fixed with official plugins working in unison?

Some thoughts :

YUI really needs one core person with an iron fist and a clear goal driving it forward. It feels like it has the guts of something incredibly useful, but is being pulled in too many directions.

In a large company its tempting to think ' we better keep that for Sandras or Simons team' .. dont do that... think like a startup and throw bad shit away :]

I can live with the verboseness if the Widgets are really nice - and thats a way to get HTML5/js/web-startup developers thinking about Yahoo again.

Some ideas -

Be ambitious upstarts, dont ask permission to kickass.

Give the team autonomy / ie. a virtual startup within Yahoo. Maybe split off a team or an Open Source startup ?

Demand all Yahoo use latest YUI by religious edict from on high [ Doug ? ]

Consider mobile?

Drop the legacy crud, get rid of any fallbacks, burn the bridges!

One Unified example, or a framework / app-designer as the canonical YUI demo

Gord, thanks for the comments. Very much appreciated. Here are some of my thoughts...

> "Give the team autonomy / ie. a virtual startup within Yahoo. Maybe split off a team or an Open Source startup ?"

Everyone involved with the project, from upper management on down, are all engineers, and by having Yahoo entirely fund the YUI project it allows each of us to focus on nothing but building things for our community. If we were spun off, then we have to worry about making money, and well... I'd rather be coding. Even as a spin-off, if Yahoo (and others?) funded us 100%, I don't think much would change compared to how we currently operate. In my opinion, Yahoo is the best customer (and parent) a JavaScript library could ask for.

> "Demand all Yahoo use latest YUI by religious edict from on high"

When you hear the execs publicly talk about replacing old infrastructure components, upgrading everyone from YUI2 to YUI3 was one of those things we've been working on heavily. Flickr, Mail, and the Homepage are all on YUI 3.3.0+. By the end of 2011, all Y! Media properties will be on a recent version as well. That means the vast majority of the 80+ billion pageviews/month will be using a current YUI3 release. Maybe not bleeding edge, but close enough. YUI2 is deprecated and will only be receiving security fixes, if any ever arise.

> "Consider mobile?"

It's very much on our minds. It currently works great in mobile because of the efficient codebase, modular architecture, and the combohandler, but we're working on filling in some of the missing pieces. Stay tuned.

> "One Unified example, or a framework / app-designer as the canonical YUI demo"

We had a long-discussion about that very topic today. Now that we're on a new, self-hosted website, it opens up many possibilities for what we can do to really show off the library.

And.. Warm Hug to all the team for nice work on the site and congrats on the 3.4 release!

re my last point as I just noticed YUI App Framework -

I like the idea of a framework.. but the Todo List app just seems overweight.

I personally dont want to see a Rails style or heavy iOS/Cocoa style framework for web.

What I like about Javascript is it has enough lisp that I can write surprisingly small amounts of code, and the code reads like the way I think about the problem. Also the async events are magic in terms of decoupling components [ reducing cross dependencies ].

I content that concise frameworks are possible in Javascript [and lisp], whereas they are not possible in C/Java/C++/ObjectiveC.

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