Simon Willison’s Weblog

Porting Flickr to YUI 3: Lessons in Performance (at YUIConf 2010). Some very interesting tips here. The new Flickr photo pages suffered from what I’ve been calling “Flash of Un-Behavioured Content”, where slow loading JavaScript results in poor behaviour from some UI controls. They started using “Action Queueing”, where a small JS stub ensures a loading indicator is shown for clicks on features that have not yet fully loaded. Also, it turns out some corporate firewalls (Sonicwall in particular) dislike URLs over 1600 characters, and filter out any URL with xxx in it. # 10th November 2010, 6:33 pm

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

Today’s News and Yahoo!’s Developer Program. “For SearchMonkey and BOSS, we currently do not have anything concrete to tell you” ... “We wanted to let you know that today’s news does not affect these products [YUI, YQL, Pipes]”. # 30th July 2009, 12:20 pm

Coupling asynchronous scripts. More from Steve Souders, this time discussing methods to cause externally loaded scripts to execute in the correct order, obeying dependencies. Surprisingly there’s no mention of YUI loader or the Dojo packaging system. # 30th April 2009, 7:57 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

Manage Amazon EC2 With New Web-Based AWS Management Console. Finally! I’m amazed it took Amazon so long to do this. Managing EC2 instances from a custom Firefox extension was pretty bizarre. It’s a very nice interface, built on top of YUI. Unfortunately you still have to manage your entire virtual server farm using a single shared Amazon account. # 9th January 2009, 9:34 am

Visual Event. External code loading bookmarklet that visualises the JavaScript events hooked up to the current page, and lets you view the source code of the event handling function for each one. Only works for events added by jQuery, YUI or MooTools since those libraries maintain a cache of event handlers that they add, to work around the standard DOM’s omission of handler introspection. # 10th December 2008, 3:38 pm

YUI 3.0 Preview Release 1. YUI sandboxing is a really good idea, which cleverly addresses both the need to run multiple versions of the library at once and the complaints about how verbose traditional YUI code can get. # 14th August 2008, 10:03 am

Doctype: /trunk/goog. Google’s newly released JavaScript library (pure JavaScript, so more along the lines of YUI and jQuery than GWT). I haven’t found the documentation for it yet, but the code is extremely well commented. UPDATE: The documentation is spread throughout Doctype. # 14th May 2008, 9:12 pm

Insert Dojo and YUI bookmarklets. Combine with Jash for interactive API experimentation on any web page. # 9th December 2007, 12:38 pm

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

ActsAsUndoable. Lawrence Carvalho shows how robust undo functionality can be added to a JavaScript application through careful application of the Memento design pattern. # 18th September 2007, 3:51 pm

Protoscript (via) JavaScript tool designed for easy prototyping of JS interactions; powered by YUI and jQuery. # 7th September 2007, 10:55 pm

Some Notes on the YUI Rich Text Editor. Dav Glass explains how he achieved the impressive feat of building a rich text editor widget that also works in Safari. # 15th August 2007, 8:13 pm

YUI 2.3.0. New components are a rich text editor, dojo-style package loader, lazy ImageLoader, colour picker and unit test framework. Easier skinning as well. # 1st August 2007, 8:20 am

YUI-based Image Cropper Widget. Nice implementation of a useful widget. # 30th July 2007, 12:56 pm

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

start.gotapi.com. Lightning fast lookups of API documentation; includes Python docs, YUI, HTML, CSS and lots more. # 5th June 2007, 6:05 pm

Online and offline development with the YUI and Charles (via) Stuart Colville shows how the Charles debugging proxy can be used to serve up hosted YUI files while developing offline. # 15th May 2007, 2:41 pm

Using YUI with the Yahoo! Maps AJAX API. I got bitten by this today—if you’re using both YUI and a Yahoo! map on the same page you need to take a few precautions to avoid library version conflicts. # 8th May 2007, 4:07 pm

The YUI Team Is Hiring an Engineer To Work on Firebug. “... we’re opening a search for a full-time developer to work with Joe on advancing the Firebug roadmap.” # 7th May 2007, 10:40 pm

The website to web application gradient. Jeremy snapped this cunning illustration at my JavaScript Libraries panel at the Web 2.0 Expo. # 20th April 2007, 12:30 am

Ext JS. Jack Slocum is building a business around his excellent Ext JavaScript library (which can now run on top of YUI, jQuery or Prototype). The library itself is LGPL, but you can pay for a commercial license and support. # 3rd April 2007, 10:11 pm

DED|Chain JavaScript Library (via) Dustin’s new JavaScript library, which puts a JQuery style chained API on top of YUI. # 20th March 2007, 10:36 am

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

Fork JavaScript. A great name for Yet Another JavaScript Library. This one tries to combine the best bits from YUI and Prototype. # 20th January 2007, 11:39 pm

YUI CSS Grid builder (via) The YUI CSS grid system can be hard to get your head around. This interactive tool makes it much easier to figure out. # 16th December 2006, 10:30 pm