Simon Willison’s Weblog

Introducing the YUI 3 Gallery. Write a plugin for YUI3, BSD license it and sign a CLA and Yahoo! will push your module out to their CDN and make it loadable using the YUI().use() statement. They’re coordinating the submissions using GitHub. # 4th November 2009, 11:14 pm

YUI 3.0.0: First GA Release of YUI’s Next-Generation Codeline. YUI 3 has some very neat ideas—everything is dynamically loaded, so you start with a tiny bootstrap script and call YUI().use(’module-name’) to load just the code you need. Congratulations to the team. # 29th September 2009, 11:38 pm

JS-Placemaker—geolocate texts in JavaScript. Chris Heilmann exposed Placemaker to JavaScript (JSONP) using a YQL execute table. Try his examples—I’m impressed that “My name is Jack London, I live in Ontario” returns just Ontario, demonstrating that Placemaker’s NLP is pretty well tuned. # 23rd May 2009, 12:36 am

With YQL Execute, the Internet becomes your database. This is nuts (in a good way). Yahoo!’s intriguing universal SQL-style XML/JSONP web service interface now supports JavaScript as a kind of stored procedure language, meaning you can use JavaScript and E4X to screen-scrape web pages, then query the results with YQL. # 29th April 2009, 10:50 pm

A Snapshot of The Yahoo! Photos Beta (from 2006). Scott Schiller shares an internal retrospective on the Yahoo! Photos interface from 2006, which was years ahead of its time (they started building it before the term Ajax had even been coined). The material on memory management and event delegation is particularly interesting. # 12th January 2009, 10:21 pm

Yahoo, Caja, OpenSocial. Yahoo!’s new application platform uses OpenSocial, and protects itself from malicious JavaScript using Google’s Caja secure JavaScript engine. I hadn’t realised that Caja was ready for production use—this is excellent news. # 30th October 2008, 5:14 pm

Why we switched to Jetty. Zimbra (recently acquired by Yahoo!) are using Jetty for Comet. It sounds like they are using Bayeux as well. # 8th January 2008, 5:12 am

YUI 2.4.0 released. Lots of great new features, but the one I’m most excited about is Selector: YUI finally has a CSS query engine. # 5th December 2007, 3:32 pm

Yahoo! Search Contextual Precaching. Neat performance trick on Yahoo! Search: the moment you start typing (indicating you intend to search) the site quietly fires off a bunch of requests to precache assets needed for the search results page. # 16th November 2007, 3:58 pm

The Elements of JavaScript Style. Douglas Crockford illustrates better coding practises through refactoring of old code. # 13th September 2007, 8:22 am

A JavaScript Module Pattern. I’ve been using this pattern for a few months—it works really well, though I tend to keep my own code in my own namespace rather than adding it to YAHOO. # 12th June 2007, 11:30 pm

Serving YUI Files from Yahoo! Servers (via) If everyone who uses YUI links to the same set of files, your users will already have the YUI code cached in their browser when they arrive on your site. # 23rd February 2007, 6:45 pm

Yahoo! UI Library. Open Source JavaScript widgets and libraries. # 14th February 2006, 1:12 am