We may have gotten a little behind on our RSS feeds (although we read every tweet in the prolific #yuiconf stream on Twitter), so this week’s In the Wild may drop the ball on a few items; let us know in the comments or @yuilibrary if we missed something important.

• YUI 3 on Major Australian Real Estate Site: Mark Rall (@codeinfront) tweeted to let us know about a major Australian real estate site powered by YUI 3. (Original source.) #
  
• C|Net’s Stephen Shankland Discusses the Most Recent GBS Update: In our latest Graded Browser Support update, we noted that we anticipate ending the A-Grade recommendation for IE6 in Q1 2011. This forecast generated a lot of conversation, including over at C|Net where Stephen Shankland had this to say: “IE6, introduced in 2001, lacks support for many Web standards–many old ones as well as a host of important new ones–and is feeble at processing Web-based JavaScript programs essential to the new era of dynamic, rich sites. It’s also more vulnerable to security threats. Although IE6 usage is gradually waning, it’s still common, in part because it’s built into Windows XP and hard to dislodge from corporate computing environments. Dealing a blow to the browser, YUI developers Eric Miraglia and Matt Sweeney in a blog post said Yahoo expects to ‘discontinue A-grade for Internet Explorer 6, moving it to C-Grade’ in the first quarter of 2011 so there’s more time to focus on mobile browsers and other important new areas.” #
  
• Storing Snippets of Data on Your Page Via YUI 3: Andrew Wooldridge continues his set of YUI 3 tutorials. Writes Andrew: “Every time I do some digging into YUI3, I find things that are really interesting and useful. Take, for instance, Node.getData() and Node.setData(). These little methods allow you to store information associated with a particular Node, but you dont have to try to create some custom attribute or keep track of your own independent data storage object for you to use these methods. In a way, it allows you to associate information of any kind with elements on your page and are retrievable just by finding the Node and asking for the data. It’s like having a database on your page where the Nodes are the keys.” #
  
• YUI 3 Quick Tip: Conditionally Load DataURI’d CSS or MHTML: Pat Cavit wrote up a great tip he picked up from YUI engineer Adam Moore at YUIConf: “If you’re already using the YUI 3 Loader to load some of your CSS like I do for some sites this can come in really handy. You could also do this via conditional comments, but you can’t control when the load happens in that case. The trick is to define the trigger for the MHTML module to trigger off of the regular module, & also make sure that the MHTML module will supersede the regular one. Then, it’s a simple matter of setting up either the simple UA check or a test function that returns true/false.” #
  
• Speed Scrabble Online Built with YUI 2.8: SuperNifty’s Speed Scrabble Online leverages YUI 2.8′s utilities collection and widgets like TreeView and ProgressBar. (Original source.) #
  
• Insert (Simple)YUI into Any Page with @triptych’s Bookmarklet: Writes Andrew: “I’m sure after some time working with the web, you tend to accumulate some handy bookmarklets. I know that for me you can never have enough of these things. I’m note sure what confluence of circumstances arose to create them, but they are often extremely useful. If you find yourself working with YUI and you run across a site you want to muck around with, perhaps for a demo or a more enhanced helper for Firebug – you might use this bookmarklet…” (Original source.) #
• YUI-related Tweet of the Week: A tweet that made us smile this week: #
  

• YUI 3 on the New Yahoo! Mail Beta: Mike Curtis writes about YUI 3 usage on the new Yahoo! Mail beta in a YDN blog post: “For JavaScript, we decided to use YUI3. Yahoo! Mail Beta is built using the YUI framework from the ground up. One of the great benefits of YUI is that it’s modular, allowing us to pull in libraries as needed as opposed to downloading everything up front. Modernizing the markup and using YUI3 for JavaScript reduced total download size for the application by 35 percent, a huge performance win.” Check out the full article here. #
  
• Sam Stephenson Releases Hork: Sam Stephenson from 37signals, author of the Prototype JavaScript library, has released a new project called Hork. According to Sam, “Hork is a little Rack middleware for transparently compressing JS & CSS assets with YUI Compressor.” (Original source.) #
  
• Guild Wars 2 Site Launched with YUI 3.2.0 + Gallery: Pat Cavit (@tivac) wrote in to tell us about the new Guild Wars site. “We launched http://hom.guildwars2.com which is a fully YUI 3-powered site. It takes advantage of Eric Ferraiuolo’s overlay plugins, Ryan Grove’s history module, a few custom-built (now in the gallery) anim plugins, a generic animation module), [and] all sorts of loader/base/event stuff. It also heavily uses the new transition module.” (Original source.) #
  
• “Learning YUI Pt.3 – SimpleYUI and Exploring the API” (via @triptych): Andrew Wooldridge continues his series of tutorials on YUI 3, this time with a look at SimpleYUI and Y.log. “SimpleYUI is like getting one of those cheese samplers in the mail. You dont have to go for a big commitment, but you can try out a lot of things without worrying about a lot of the safeguards you might later want to have. I have created a landing page for SimpleYUI, but in summary its like getting to play with YUI without worrying about all that .use() stuff, or anonymous functions, etc. It’s a lot like how you might have experienced jQuery for the first time. You get a lot of powerful functionality up front, and you only need a single js + a few lines of code to get started. For some great examples, check out this page from Eric Miraglia. SimpleYUI gives you DOM, Events (and custom events!!!) transitions, and AJAX. It’s perfect for folks who just want to add some animations or fun effects for your site in no time flat.” The full writeup is here. #
  
• Montage Maker from @pamelafox Ported to YUI 3: Pamela Fox ported her cool Montage Maker application to YUI 3 — and now, she says, it’s both faster and more stable. (Original source.) #
  
• Simple List Manager with YUI 3 on JsFiddle from @apipkin: Anthony Pipkin shared a little list manager he wrote — highlighting the intrinsic power of YUI 3 and also the ever-increasing usefulness of jsFiddle. (Original source.) #
  
• Secure-TSPlayer Admin Driven by YUI 3 and 2-in-3: Caridy pointed out the Secure-TSPlayer Dreamweaver plugin, whose admin section makes use of YUI 3 as well as YUI 2 components like DataTable via the 2-in-3 mechanism. #
  
• YUI 3-based Pong from @bruciemoose: Andrew Bruce has been playing around with YUI 3 and test-driven development. The result: A simple Pong implementation. “In case you’re one of my clients, you might be wondering why I’ve been slacking off recently. Here’s why: I’ve been teaching myself ‘grown up’ JavaScript under instruction of Douglas Crockford (in book and video form, obviously). Crockford never mentions Test Driven Development, probably because he doesn’t do it. But I do, so I’ve been learning to do that in JavaScript too.So here it is, HTML5 Canvas Pong. Pong is effectively a Hello, World! application for game developers. It’s not particularly fun, and my version is full of amusing bugs….” You can read the full post here, or jump in and give the game a try. #
• JsFiddle Adds SimpleYUI Support: The jsFiddle team has added support for the SimpleYUI rollup for YUI 3, which instantiates itself and creates a global YUI instance (Y) with support for common Ajax library operations. You’ll find the SimpleYUI checkbox under the library selection menu when you select YUI 3.2.0. (Thanks to Andrew Wooldridge for the tip.) #

• Andrew Wooldridge, “Learning YUI: Pt. 2 – Community, Logging, and the Console”: Andrew Wooldridge (@triptych) is back with part 2 of his new “Learning YUI” blog series. I particularly like (and agree with) his take on the YUI community: “In a word, community is really what makes YUI stand out to me as a javascript library. If you need help working with YUI, there are community forums, an IRC channel, as well as Open Hours that allow you to talk directly with YUI developers. I would recommend that you get connected early on in your learning experience, especially with the IRC channel because you will discover a helpful group of smart folks hang out there and are willing to answer any question, no matter how seemingly mundane. You also should follow yuilibrary on twitter as you will be tapped into the latest YUI news there.” Check out the full blog post for more. I covered part one in a previous “In the Wild” column. #
  
• Andrew Burgess’s “Crash Course” on YUI 2 Grids on NetTuts: Andrew Burgess’s “Crash Course” on YUI 2 Grids, which we first noted in May last year, has been picked up by NetTuts and is bringing a new wave of attention to what has historically been one of YUI’s most popular projects. #
  
• Create a BlogRoll with Google Spreadsheets and YUI3: Andrew Wooldridge (@triptych) continues his series of YUI 3-focused articles with a new entry that ties together YUI 3 and Google Docs. “I admit it: I was inspired by this article by Codeinfront.com. The idea of creating a snippet of code that anyone can share, update, and learn from is just extremely compelling and gratifying. So, I offer to you something that you may have never thought of. You can use Google Spreadsheets as a JSON data source. YUI3′s JSONP module talks very nicely to this JSON data source and allows you to essentially create sites that can be data driven and yet never require you to have a complicated PHP MyAdmin setup or MYSQL database. You can do it all via client-side technologies and some help from Google Spreadsheets. If you combine this with the Forms ability in G Spreadsheets, you could even create a cool report page based on some survey you create. Let’s get down to code.” Get down to code with the full blog post here #
  
• Video Remixing Site Dragontape Using YUI 3: Video remixing site Dragontape is making extensive use of YUI 3. Here’s how the site’s authors describe the project: “Dragontape is a webapp that enables you to create mixtapes of your favorite online videos, so you can watch them as a continuous show. The tapes you create are accessed through a single URL, so you can easily share with friends or embed them in a webpage. The source clips remain in their original locations, Dragontape simply remembers where to find them.” #
  
• Erik Eldridge, “Simple YUI 3 Module for Yahoo! Login”: YDN evangelist Erik Eldrige has written up a nice tutorial on his personal blog that shows you how to leverage YUI 3 and Yahoo!’s OpenID system simply and efficiently. Writes Erik: “Looking at the OpenID landing page on the YDN site might give the impression that logging users into a site with a Yahoo! ID is difficult. Given the following conditions, however, adding Yahoo! login to your site can be quite simple:
  1. Because we’re only targeting Yahoo! accounts, we can preset the login location to https://open.login.yahooapis.com/openid/op/auth
  2. If we log users in via a popup, but manage everything via JavaScript on the parent page, we can skip validation of the response coming back from Yahoo!”

  You can find the full tutorial here. #
  

• Upstage, a New YUI 3-powered HTML5 Presentation System by Reid Burke: @Reid is just getting this project underway, but there’s a lot to like already. Following in the footsteps of a series of standards-based presentation tools that have launched in the last few years, Upstage puts a YUI 3 twist on the genre. Code is on GitHub — download, fork, and have fun. (Original source.) #
  
• A Simple Twitter Widget with YUI 3 and YQL (by @codeinfront): @codeinfront has posted a new tutorial on using YUI 3 and YQL in a Twitter mashup. “While in between projects I’ve been playing around with JavaScript dates including conversion to relative time. This then lead me to testing the function within a Twitter widget context. I ended up with a Twitter widget using YUI 3 and YQL. The code below explores a couple of interesting concepts…” Check out the blog post for full details. #
  
• “YUI, How Dare You Make Me Rethink…”: Michigan Techie writes that YUI 3 is designed to break bad habits and challenges him to find new, hopefully better coding patterns. “When you use YUI3 you have a YUI().use() and everything gets encapsulated within that bit of code. So if I were to just move the MyApp code into the YUI block I’m no longer able to access it from the page of content I want to run JS on. So this is good, no JS globals, but it’s bad…not the way I’ve been doing things.” You can see MT’s full epiphany here. #
  
• Jeez.eu on Building a Custom Search Engine with YUI: Jeez.eu’s tutorial on building a custom search engine relies heavily on YUI 2 widgets and utilities. #
  
• Node.js Resource List from @codeinfront Includes Crockford, Dav Glass: Blogger Mark Rall (@codeinfront) has compiled a set of his favorite Node.js-related resources. Key among them are two recent YUI Theater talks from Douglas Crockford and Dav Glass. For his other favorites, head over to his blog. #
• ErisDS Has Updated Her Carousel Custom-navigation Example for 2.8.x: Northampton blogger ErisDS has updated her work on custom navigation for YUI 2 Carousel to support YUI 2.8.x. “Last year I published two parts of a three part tutorial (doh) on the YUI2 Carousel Widget which worked with YUI Carousel 2.7.0. Since that time, a new couple of new versions of the YUI2: Carousel widget have been released (2.8.0 and 2.8.1), and it seems my examples do not work with the updated code. This post covers the issues, the reasons why they occur and how to resolve them.” Check out the full post here. #
  
• Tweet of the Week: From @bartt: “Being able to use #YUI on both client & server is so nice. JavaScript + my favorite library on both sides of the fence == !context switch.” #
  

TipTheWeb is a new service that lets people directly support their favorite web content by tipping it. For instance, if you find a great blog post, you could tip it 25 cents.

TipTheWeb is a non-profit organization promoting freely-accessible, high-quality web content by awarding publishers that receive tips. If you publish online, you can use your TipTheWeb account to claim the places you publish to receive tips and be eligible to receive awards from TipTheWeb.

TipTheWeb’s Use of YUI 3

The user interface of TipTheWeb is completely built on top of YUI 3 (we drank the Kool-Aid.) The approach we took was to use YUI 3 as the foundation and structure for our JavaScript code. We’ve built 33 custom YUI 3 modules (56 if you include submodules, plugins, and roll-ups), several of which we contributed the YUI 3 Gallery: Component Manager, Markout, Overlay Extras, and REST Resource.

Page-Level Classes

The core features of TipTheWeb are implemented on a few highly-functional web pages which communicate with the server over Ajax. For each of these pages we created a custom YUI 3 module that exposes a page-level class used to coordinate actions between the functional parts of the page.

In one of our application’s main pages, the Tips page, you can see how this approach is applied with the page-level class TipsWindow. The main functional parts of the page are the widgets: CreateTip used for creating tips, and the TipList widgets for editing, canceling, and funding existing tips.

A Lot of Overlays

We use Y.Overlays extensively throughout our application’s UI to implement user-interactions; this allows us to keep the interface clutter-free while still having the functionality for advanced features available on the page. We needed features that were not built into Y.Overlay, so we developed Overlay Extras, which is in the YUI 3 Gallery and being used by a lot of other YUI 3 powered sites. Here are some place where we use Overlays on TipTheWeb:

Current State of TipTheWeb

We’d love for you to try out TipTheWeb; right now we are in invite-only beta, so request an invite on our site and we’ll send you an invite code.

Be sure to catch our talk at YUIConf 2010 where we will be presenting (more in depth) on how we use YUI 3 and YQL at TipTheWeb.

Meanwhile, here are a few other recent pieces of news from the community:

• Andrew Wooldridge — “Learning YUI: Introduction”: Andrew Wooldridge (@triptych) is embarking on a series of YUI articles on his blog, and the introductory piece is online: “I’ve decided to write a few articles about getting starting in YUI, and various things I learn as I go along… I assume you have some sort of need for a javascript library, or perhaps you read about YUI and are basically curious about it. Let me give you a bit of a background. YUI was originally created as a common set of javascript library functions within Yahoo years ago, with the idea of allowing web developers to have a basic set of functionality to use inside Yahoo pages. This naturally grew and expanded – breaking out of just Yahoo and also moving towards and open set of components you see today. Yahoo folks curate the library but take changes and updates from anyone, and you are free to use this code any way you like… YUI may seem like this giant set of libraries, doing everything from animations to widgets, but in reality the YUI team has tried hard to make it very small, fast, and modular. You only load the bare core when you include the YUI base js (although you can if you want load more via the configurator) and when you need more functionality, you can fetch it on the fly and avoid having long initial download times for your page.” Check out the full post for more. #
  
• Evan Goer (@evangoer), “YUI 3 Grids Are Dead Simple”: Evan likes Matt Sweeney’s YUI 3 Grids, which debuted in beta in YUI 3.2.0. Writes Evan: “Not only is this version tiny (1.5 KB), but it’s the first layout system I’ve ever used where I can just write out whatever grid I want from memory, without ever needing to look at the docs.” Check out the full article for more. (Original source.) #
  
• Saurabh Odhyan on the YUI 3 Cache Utility: Writes Saurabh: YUI 3 Cache “allows to cache frequently used data in javascript memory (Basic caching) or HTML5 localStorage object (Offline caching). Although we can implement our own caching mechanism in javascript, the YUI caching is general purpose and also provides a set of events. Moreover it can be easily integrated with YUI Datasource which can be very beneficial. I’ll show you how useful YUI caching utility can be using a very standard example, Factorial.” (Original source.) #
  
• IHikeWithMeetup.com Built with YUI 2.8: IHikeWithMeetup.com is a clever mashup of Meetup.com data from Bay Area hiking groups along with weather data and Yahoo! Maps — and all hosted with Yahoo web hosting. Naturally, the site is powered by a healthy helping of YUI 2.8 components. #
  
• Canonical’s Landscape Ubuntu Systems Manager Powered by YUI 3: Canonical uses YUI 3 extensively, including in its Landscape product. According to the product page, “Landscape makes the management and monitoring of Ubuntu systems simple and effective by combining world-class support with easy to use online management tools.” #
  
• Sidnei Da Silva, “Even Faster Websites with YUI”: Writes Sidnei: “Ever since I got my copy of Steve Souders’ Even Faster Web Sites I’ve became obsessed with speed. During my day job I’m constantly looking for things that can be improved to make the user experience smoother, specially for first-time visitors. I’m fairly happy with what we’ve achieved in the last year, though there are always things to be improved. Today I’m going to share with you one of the tricks that we’ve discovered almost by accident and that can help with making your website faster, if YUI is your Javascript framework of choice.” (Original source.) #
  

About the author: Stefan Klopp is the Director of Development for ExpressITech, the parent company of Car Rental Express. Stefan has been developing highly usable web solutions for the car rental industry in various roles over the last 6 years. He currently lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Car Rental Express is the leading independent car rental comparison website on the Internet. It lets users rent cars online in more than 1000 cities and airports around the world.

Our user base is largely non-technical, which means they want to compare prices and rent cars as easily as possible. With the relaunch of our website in June of 2010 we have implemented many components of YUI 2 to help provide our customers with an intuitive experience.

Which YUI components are we using?

The components that we’ve been using include Connection Manager, AutoComplete, DataSource, Calendar, Animation, JSON, and Container.

Why we chose YUI

When reviewing the different JavaScript libraries that we could potentially use on Car Rental Express, we found that the YUI was the most complete for our needs. The biggest selling features for us was the very modular approach the YUI took to implement different design patterns, as well as the robust documentation and examples they provided. From a development standpoint this led to rapid development of our application without having to struggle with a library.

How we use YUI

We utilize the YUI in a number of ways. Our 4 most used components are AutoComplete, Calendar, Container, and Connection Manager. Here are some of the ways we use each of these components.

AutoComplete

The AutoComplete component is used extensively on our site to help users find a city or airport in which to rent a car. We really liked how easy it was to implement this component, and how quickly it responds. We cache search results server-side to help improve search results; however, having the client-side caching also helped tremendously in speeding up the response of the component. Another feature that we really took to was how easy the results were to style. When displaying the locations to the user this was crucial as we needed to identify which locations where found in cities and which were found at airports.

Calendar

The Calendar component is also used throughout the site when a renter is filling in dates to conduct a search. We are using a customized version of John Peloquin’s Interval Selection Calendar and displaying it in a YUI Dialog. Essentially what we wanted to do was give the renter a two-month view when choosing their dates, as well as visually show them what date range they currently have selected. Again, this was extremely straightforward to implement using YUI 2 Calendar, and it basically came down to creating a YUI Dialog, setting the body to contain a div for the Calendar, then attaching a YUI Interval Calendar to that div.

Containers

We utilize YUI Containers throughout our website in a number of different ways. In the example above we were using a Dialog to help us display the Interval Calendar when a user was selecting a date. On our rate search results page we make heavy use of Containers to give the renter more information on different aspects of the car rental agency and the vehicle they might potentially rent. Most of the containers on this page are Panels that we re-use for each different listing. For example, the vehicle display features Panel:

Things got a little more fun with the Renter Rated agency ratings. When displaying the ratings, we really wanted to focus the user’s attention to the scores an agency received and to display this information in a clean, easy-to-view way. By utilizing the Dialog Control we were able to constrain the viewport and center the dialog easily to help us achieve this goal. By setting a blank header and footer it made styling simple by just adding the appropriate styles to our CSS. The end result was a clean ratings container that provides the renter with the information they want.

Connection Manager

Connection Manager is used throughout the site whenever we need to pull data via a XHR request. In some of the examples above we utilize this component for requesting cities and airports for the AutoComplete implementaitons and pulling the rating information for the Renter Rated Dialog.

One interesting way we utilize Connection Manager is with our rental center block that sits on most pages. To help with performance we do a lot of full-page caching on many of our content pages. However, we still wanted to display the dynamic rental center block on these pages. This presented us with a problem we were able to solve with Connection Manager. Rather than having to break up our fully cached page and cache only aspects of the page we found it was easier to just include the rental center block via a simple asynchronous request. We found that this allowed us to retain the performance from having a fully cached page, yet still display dynamic content in our rental center box.

Final Thoughts

Overall we have been extremely happy with our choice to use YUI. It provides us with a modular library that is well documented, easy to use and implement.

• YUI Theater Tops NetTuts List of Must-see F2E Podcasts: Andrew Burgess writes about YUI Theater: “It seems that as often as a few times a month, Yahoo! brings in developers on the cutting edge of web technology to keep their employees up to date. For the benefit of the rest of us, these talks are recorded and published. You’ll find well-known devs like Douglas Crockford and Nicholas Zakas, and talks on everything from performance and accessibility to JavaScript and the DOM.” #
  
• DigitalInsurance.com (an @apipkin Site) Powered by YUI 3: Prolific gallery contributor Anthony Pipkin has helped produce the new DigitalInsurance.com portal, powered by YUI 3. #
  
• Progressive Enhancement Using Nothing but JS (@codepo8 on @davglass): Christian Heilmann writes on Ajaxian: “Progressive enhancement is still a confusing matter for a lot of people who are very excited about the capabilities of JavaScript in modern browser environments. It can feel anachronistic to write your solutions for a non-JS environment and then once more enhances in JavaScript. I grew up like that so for me it is a simple matter of doing the right thing but with today’s world of JavaScript libraries and out-of-the-box widgets it can seem a drag. Enter Dav Glass of the YUI team. He’s been turning the concept of progressive enhancement around in his head and as a JS lover and backend code “endurer” he set out to solve this issue once and for all in a pure JavaScript way.” Check out the full article for details. #
  
• More Overlay Plugins for YUI 3 from Oliver Andrich: From Oliver’s GitHub page: “Overlay Plugins is a collection of five plugins I wrote in order to learn YUI 3 plugin developement in general. Three out of five plugins more or less mimic the Overlay Extras created by Eric Ferraiuolo…. The five plugins are:
  • BaseOverlayPlugin
  • ModalOverlay
  • KeepAligned
  • HideOnEscape
  • ConstrainDimensions”

  (Original source.) #

• Reid Burke’s YUI Slides for HackU at Carnegie Mellon: YUI engineer (and Yeti author) Reid Burke whipped up some slides and a YUI 3-based slideshow engine for his recent talk at Carnegie Mellon. #
  
• Devcurry on Learning JS from Crockford and Other Gurus on YUI Theater: Suprotim Agarwal writes in devcurry this morning: “In this post, I will share links of some very useful JavaScript videos and lectures delivered by JavaScript Gurus, full of information, fun watching and absolutely Free! Although the internet is full of free videos, I have chosen only a couple of them, which I found the most useful. Get ready to take notes as you learn.. Crockford’s video lectures on JavaScript – Douglas Crockford is a JavaScript architect and plays and important role in designing new features of the language. His videos are a ‘must-have’ for any JavaScript developer. YUI Theater – Provides access to free programming talks by gurus on JavaScript and web development.” Suprotim goes on to list some other sources of content, including other YUI Theater titles. #
  

• Duck Duck Go — Search Powered by BOSS and YUI: Duck Duck Go is an alternative search interface powered by a number of interesting APIs, including Yahoo’s Search BOSS and YUI 2.8. I particularly like it’s approach in disambiguating acronyms. #
  
• YUI 2 and @caridy’s Bubbling Library Helping to Power FordVehicles.com: YUI 2 utilities (including Drag and Drop) and widgets (including AutoComplete) accompany Caridy Patiño Mayea’s YUI-based Bubbling Library on the FordVehicles.com site. #
  
• IG Markets Forex Trading Platform Using YUI 2: IG Markets, a major online forex and currency trading platform, has incorporated a variety of YUI 2 components in its online tools. #
  
• Beautiful New “Dana” Theme for YUI Doc from @carlo: Carlo Zottman has released his new Dana theme for YUI Doc output. The new theme looks fantastic, and it’s available on GitHub. (Original source.) #
  
• Flint Studio on YUI 2 CSS Grids: Writes Ross at Flint Studio in his survey of great web development tools: “I started using Yahoo’s YUI Grids CSS framework nearly a year ago, and I’ve continued to do so as it has been a reliable performer across all browsers and has saved me much time laying out my Websites. It is slightly less flexible than other CSS frameworks like 960 and Blueprint, but because of this, it is also more enjoyable to use as there is less to learn. I find the markup to be more semantic with YUI than the other CSS frameworks as well, so thats a large plus in my book.” #
  
• Ajaxian’s @reybango on SimpleYUI, Coming in 3.2.0: Rey introduces SimpleYUI this way: “The Yahoo! YUI is an incredibly feature-rich JavaScript library with a LOT of functionality but getting your head around all of those features can be tough. The YUI team wants to help developers get up and running more quickly and announced yesterday the release of SimpleYUI; a basic and more streamlined version of the YUI library.” SimpleYUI is a rollup of common, core modules in the library, with the added twist that it self-instantiates — making it a little simpler and more accessible for those new to YUI. You can read more about SimpleYUI here. #
  
• “SimpleYUI Makes YUI Easy to Use,” by @codeinfront: Australian developer @codeinfront had this to say about the SimpleYUI implementation in YU1 3.2.0: “YUI 3 is a powerful CSS and JavaScript framework including low-level DOM utilities and high-level user-interface widgets designed to make front end application development simpler and more robust. Now with the addition of SimpleYUI rapid, lightweight development is made even simpler. Best of all, those used to jQuery-style syntax can start using YUI 3 today while learning the intricacies of developing larger applications.” #
• MobileCrunch Covers the YUI 3.2.0 Release: Greg Kumparak, editor of MobileCrunch, had this to say about the recent YUI 3.2.0 release: “Gather up a group of people who make their living through web design, and they’ll probably all agree on at least two things: A) touchscreens aren’t going anywhere, and B) designing web stuff for touchscreens sort of sucks. Native apps have, in a sense, spoiled users; with things like drag-and-drop and basic touch gesture recognition almost laughably simple to implement in native apps, web app developers are left to hack in such features themselves or risk having their app seem dated from the get-go. Today Yahoo! is looking to make things a bit less painful with the latest release of their open-source User Interface library, YUI.” You can read the full article here. #
  
• Sweet Justice, a Text Justification Plugin for YUI 3 from Carlos Bueno: Writes Carlos: “Sweet Justice is a Javascript library you can drop onto any web page to create beautiful justified text. Even supercalifragilisticexpealadocious. Sweet Justice lovingly inserts the obscure yet wonderful soft hyphen into the text of any element marked with the sweet-justice class, and turns on CSS text justification. It requires either jQuery or YUI3 to function.” (Original source.) #
  
• YUI 3 CSS3 Selector Overview and Demo from @codeinfront: From @codeinfront: “CSS3 pseudo classes and to a lesser extent CSS3 attribute selectors enjoy varied cross browser support. If you’re keen to get your hands dirty now, one of the many JavaScript frameworks can help. In particular, YUI 3 enables support through the “selector-css3″ module however documentation at this time is limited. I’ve had a brief and by no means comprehensive play with some of them. Perhaps the demo my be of use to others.” #
  
• YUI 3 CSS/JS (+YQL) Driving NCSoft’s ArenaNet (via @tivac): NCSoft’s ArenaNet portal (courtesy of longtime YUI community member @tivac) uses YUI 3.1.0 JS and YUI 3 CSS. YQL is used to access social media stats for five social apis in a single federated, cacheable request. #
  
• Alex Hall’s YUI 2-based Tweetywall: Writes Alex: “Have you ever seen those sites that have Twitter posts sprinkled all over the place? Would you like to have access to this same functionality without having to do anything? Here at DeVSeO we use Twitter for a number of things and in a number of places. I decided to help you guys out by turning one of ours scripts that we use here into a fully customisable release so that you, too, can have Twitter on your own site with absolutely no coding ability whatsoever. It couldn’t be easier.” Alex has a demo page here. #
  
• Alex Hall’s Star Ratings Widget for YUI 2.x: This isn’t brand-new, but I missed it when it was originally posted, and you can never have too many good options for implementing the Star Ratings design pattern. Alex Hall took an existing one and built on it: “I really needed a nice little star rating system with YUI for this blog…and after a single search in Google I found Ville Saavuori’s Star Rating Script for YUI, which is perfect for the job I needed… However, for a new project I am undertaking I realised that his implementation was not going to work for multiple rating systems on the same page because it is based on ID’s, and as we all know, you can only have one ID reference in the DOM on one page. So I started to rework the script to allow for more rating systems on a single page using classes instead of ID’s.” Alex’s example page is here. #
  
• Alex Hall’s YUILight Spotlighting Widget for YUI 2: Writes Alex: “YUILight is a customisable YUI Script that will highlight an element on your page simply by applying a class of ‘yuilight’ to that element. When that element is clicked and focused on, everything else on the page will be covered by a mask and that single element will stand out from the rest. It is a very simple script to implement only requiring two javascript files and no CSS! The options for customising the script can be found at the top of the javascript file (which is fully commented for you). At the moment you can change the generic background colour (when no background colour has been specified for the element). This option is so that your element doesn’t disappear with the text. You can also configure the opacity of the mask element and the animation speed that it shows and hides. I will be adding more customisable fields later on but if you have any requests please feel free to leave them in the comments section at the bottom of this post.” He has demo page in addition to the introductory blog post. #
  
• YUI 3 and Performance: Blogger Yiota shares her thoughts about YUI 3 and performance on her yiotabytes blog, touching on YUI 3′s intrinsically non-blocking and combo-handling loader infrastructure. #
• Book Review: Brad Harris on Satyam’s “YUI 2.8: Learning the Library”: Brad gives a thumbs up to the new book: “If you read through this book in it’s entirety, you’ll come to understand the main reason I love YUI, that it’s not just a collection of widgets and utilities. This book explains the full feature set of the YUI library, and you’ll realize that it’s the perfect foundation to build on top of. The authors do a really great job of showing in depth examples that teach you how the components work. I particularly liked reading the chapter on DataSource and DataTable.” #
  
• John Lindal’s Treeble Implementation Updated for YUI 3.2.0: John’s popular Treeble gallery module has been updated to support the recent YUI 3.2.0 release. You can check it out (where else) on GitHub at http://jafl.github.com/yui3-gallery/treeble/. #
• Mapping Events Mashup Uses YUI 2 Utilities + YQL: The Mapping Events mashup is a geo/events exploration that combines a variety of APIs; prominent among these are the YUI 2 utilities and YQL. (Original source.) #
  
• Animated Image Captions with YUI from @ahallicks: One more from Alex Hall’s archives — animated image captions. From Alex: “I saw a very lovely caption effect for images at MotionLab but realised it was written for jQuery. If you have read of my other blogs here on DeVSeO you may notice that I prefer the YUI javascript library by Yahoo for all of my javascript. So, I decided to create this effect using YUI instead of jQuery.” You can read all about it on his DevSEO blog. (Original source.) #
  

• Detailed YUI 2.8.0 Rich Text Editor Article from Satyam and Packt: Satyam (Daniel Barreiro), as part of his new Packt volume YUI 2.8: Learning the Library, has published an extensive writeup on the YUI 2 Rich Text Editor on the Packt website.  You can check it out here.
  
• Excellent Coverage of the YUI 3.2.0 Preview Release on Sitepoint by @rssaddict: Louis Simoneau wrote up a nice review of the YUI 3.2.0 Preview Release 1 that we issued on July 26. Writes Louis: “A lot of [the new] features seem to have a common thread: HTML5 and mobile platforms. I’m sure that’s no accident, and it’s great to see more and better developer tools entering this space. As I said, there’s a lot more than just these features, so if you’re a YUI fan—or if you’ve yet to check it out—head on over and grab yourself a copy of the preview to play around with.”
  
• Dion Almaer on YUI 3.2.0′s Capability-based Loading: Dion Almaer has a nice article up on his personal blog about capability-based loading, a feature YUI engineer Adam Moore has added to YUI 3 and which is included in the first YUI 3.2.0 preview release. Dion reviews the state of capability-based loading in his article, starting with Google’s GWT and progressing to similar support in other JavaScript libraries. “And this brings us to YUI,” says Dion. “I was really excited to see some of the features in the YUI 3.2.0 preview release. Great stuff for touch/gesture support, but what stood out for me was ‘YUI’s intrinsic Loader now supports capability-based loading’. A-ha!” You can read Dion’s full report here.
• Pat Cavit Tutorial on Writing YUI 3 Plugins: Pat Cavit has a new tutorial up that details the creation of YUI 3 Plugins: “At their core YUI3 Plugins are a way to add new behavior to JS objects. It’s really just that simple. Going into it a little deeper you can explain the idea behind them as providing a framework-backed way to add new functionality & behaviors to host objects without the host needing to know anything about the plugins. Taking advantage of this means that you can add lots of functionality to your objects without requiring a lot of code. It’s another example of YUI3′s great support for modularity of code. Want your widget to accept flaboozulms? Write a plugin! Want your widget to support flaboozulms & flibberdybops? Write a plugin for flibberdybops & then use both the flaboozulms & flibberdybops plugins together. It’s a really powerful idea.” Check out his blog for the full article.
• Sample Chapter on YUI 2.8.0 Menu from Satyam’s New Book: Satyam has a new book out on YUI 2.8, and Packt has released a sample chapter from the new volume.  The sample chapter covers YUI Menu and can be downloaded from the book’s page on the Packt website.
• “Easy Sliding Menus” with YUI 3 by @andrew_cooke: Blogger Andrew Cooke writes the following in introducing his simple sliding-menu implementation based on YUI 3.1.1: “YUI 3 is amazing. It looks terrifyingly complex, but once you get into it,
  you can do complex things trivially. I use jQuery at work, and in comparison, YUI 3 feels like it was written by software engineers rather than people hacking web pages.” Check out his implementation of menuing here.
  
• Coverage of YUI 3.2.0 Preview Release 1 from @codepo8 on Ajaxian: Yahoo! Developer Network evangelist Christian Heilmann has a nice article up on Ajaxian talking about the July 26 YUI 3.2.0 Preview Release 1, our first public preview of the next YUI 3 release.
  
• YUI Test with the Jack Mocking Framework: Pawel Pabich has a nice writeup on his blog showing how he used YUI Test with the Jack JavaScript mocking framework to unit test some form-input validation and submission code. 
• Pivotal Tracker, an Agile Tracking System, Using YUI 2: This isn’t breaking news — it’s been around for a long time — but the Agile project management system Pivotal Tracker is heavily YUI  2-based, using the utilities suite, Container, and more.
  
• Ruby Gem for YUI Compressor from @mjijackson: Ruby hacker Michael Jackson has posted his Ruby gem for YUI Compressor on GitHub. From Michael’s project notes: “YUICompressor is a Ruby module that may be used to create compressed versions of JavaScript and CSS code quickly and easily using the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library compressor. The module is essentially a wrapper around the YUI Compressor (a Java library) that supports two different modes of operation: shell and native. In shell mode the YUI Compressor library executes in a separate process. Code is piped into and out of this process using the system shell. This approach yields good performance and is the default for MRI and other Ruby versions that are not able to execute Java code. In native mode the compressor is invoked in the same process as Ruby. This is only possible when using YUICompressor on JRuby. With this approach, compression speeds dramatically improve because the system does not incur the overhead of invoking a separate Java process for each compression.” (Original source.)
  
• YUI is About.com’s Web Design “software Pick of the Week”: Jennifer Kyrnin writes for About.com: “Sometimes the easiest way to learn a web design technique is to borrow from someone else. Now, a lot of designers will get angry if you borrow their code, but Yahoo! has put together an entire library of scripts and CSS that you can use to create interactive websites. There are two versions of the YUI framework. Version 2 has been available since 2006 and is very robust and proven. If you’re working on sites that need interactivity, but also need to be very reliable, then this is the version you should use. Version 3 is what they call their “next generation” library. It hasn’t been as widely tested, and includes things that might be more cutting edge. But if you’re building sites that need more advanced (often beta) interactivity options, this is the version for you.”
  
• Thanks, Alessandro: We enjoyed this tweet from @avernet…
  
• Notes from @joedag32 on Building a Sortable List with YUI 3 Sortable: Writes Joe: “I’ve been working on building an application that will need an easy to use sortable list, that will fire off an event upon the list order changing. As simple as this sounds, it would require a lot of coding and cross browser testing to pull this one off with just javascript alone. YUI 3 allowed me to accomplish the above in just a few minutes. I’m not even going to try to guess just how much time it’d of taken me to do on my own. I made use of the Sortable Utility to make and unordered list sortable in just a few lines of code.” Check out his solution here.
• AjaxDump’s AutoComplete Widget List: AjaxDump includes YUI among its 10 great AutoComplete tools. Beyond the YUI 2-based AutoComplete documented on the site, be sure to check out the YUI 3 Gallery autocomplete component from Nate Cavanaugh and Eduardo Lundgren — as well as their “text-box list” widget, which implements a lozenge-style autocomplete interaction.
  

Ben Delarre emailed to let us know about his YUI 3-based implementation of an LED animation builder for a Burning Man 2010 installation:

I’ve managed to put this site, the animation editor, and a HTML5 Canvas based colour picker (which i’ll be contributing to the gallery just as soon as I can…), in just a few days using YUI 3 and PHP. (Its a little slipshod in places, and there’s much more to be done to make it better, but time is running out).

Illuminatrix is a project we’ve put together over the last few months for this years Burning Man festival… Its a 2D array of 16×16 ping pong balls, each of which contains an RGB LED that can be coloured any colour of the rainbow at any time. It will be displayed in the entrance to the More Carrot theme camp and to give it a bit of a twist we’ve decided to make it possible for everyone to contribute to the animations we’ll display on it.

Everyone, no matter what their ability, can create animations quickly and easily. You can either draw each frame individually by hand, or write JavaScript to generate the frames if you are of the technical persuasion (The “Code Help!” link gives a list of some useful functions as well as some example code).

Over the next few days we’ll be putting up pictures of the build, we’re already a good way into the hardware, but the deadline is fast approaching.

…Please pass [the link] around, we want to collect as many animations as possible before August 26th when we must head off for the Burn.

Hopefully, at least one YUI team member will be there to say hello to Ben at the event, and we’re all looking forward to seeing that HTML5 Canvas-based Color Picker in the YUI 3 Gallery.