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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

I was honestly expecting much much more. Yahoo has talent, and YUI was the best library out there when it was new.

YUI was released the same year as jQuery. Care to qualify that a bit?

Edit: Had my dates wrong.

YUI was more extensible, followed (mostly) good JavaScript patterns (making heavy use of the module pattern), had relatively good cross-platform support and an easy to understand interface.

To top it off, the documentation was top notch.

> To top it off, the documentation was top notch.

Serious? That's what drove me away. It might have been top notch academically but for real life use I found it painful to get answers and simple code problems fixed.

That is not true. YUI community is pretty vibrant and the developers go out of the way to help you.

Here's an example.

The top hit on Google for "make an ajax request with (YUI|jquery)" the documentation page is the first hit.

YUI's page is here, the line of code to make the request is well below the fold. http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/connection/

JQuery's page has it listed immediately. In fact, 2 variants above the fold. http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.ajax/

I'm not saying one is right and another is wrong. I'm just saying jQuery's gets more adoption. It's easier and people tend to like that.

I don't, for example, understand why I have to scroll past the YUI dependency configurator to get to the syntax I'm looking for.

You're looking at the current version of the documentation. jQuery didn't have nearly as good documentation five years ago, and YUI's was much better than it is today (I think YUI3 is a step back for Yahoo).

So jQuery's has gotten better and YUI's has gotten worse?

I just know that when I did try it (2009) I felt the same as I do today.

At the time and for at least a year following...

  1. Yahoo hosted scripts, including roll-ups
  2. UI components and styles
  3. The best documented library, both outside and inside thde code, hands down
  4. More feature complete (ex. one I can recall off the top of my head, form handling of upload inputs didn't exist in jquery, and extending jquery internals was/is a nightmare in comparison)
  5. The best documentation, hands down
  6. Yahoo hosted scripts, including roll-ups
  7. The best documentation

jquery has come a long way with documentation, but then YUI has evolved even further in becoming a modular library.

Can you be more specific about what is missing?

It's not about what is missing. It's about what is there. The monolithic web development 'MVC' platform thread is dead and gone. Mojito is a behind the curve also-ran, definitely not New Hotness.

yahoo isn't about the new hot thing, but about the fundamentals and setting a standard for what the web should be. They did it with YUI now with Mojito

  Yahoo has talent, and YUI was the best library out there

No not really, and not it wasn't. Yahoo's UI library didn't really offer any radically new concepts. It was a recap of other libraries. For example instead of TinyMCE you could use YUI's editor which did almost the same thing, instead of jQuery you could use YUI's dom code, and so on.

I didn't really expect anything amazing from Yahoo. They'd need to come out with something truly extraordinary to make me pay attention. And given their webpage hasn't changed since 1998 I doubt that will ever happen.

> For example instead of TinyMCE you could use YUI's editor which did almost the same thing

that's like saying glibc is worthless because you can run your ISO C programs the same. and you are ignoring all the POSIX work done to it.

YUI widgets, i agree, are a little meh.

but YUI did wonders to save us from java and OO programmers that didn't want to "get" javascript but wanted to publish code anyway. it was a library for OO in javascript like no other. now YUI3 is mixing all concepts and going nowhere in particular. sad.

jQuery is pretty great, but YUI shines in bigger projects for larger teams. The 1) module system, 2) conditional loading 3) combo loading and 4) and bias for structuring your code with pub/sub; these really really help in cases where there might be many javascript mini-apps running on the page who can't know anything about the other.

jQuery has these things too, especially recently, but YUI enforces this... for better or worse, in a more "enterprise-y" way

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