Yahoo! is really on a roll lately. The company seems to be infused with a double-shot of Web 2.0 espresso. They are acquiring the right companies (Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming). They’ve avoided a lot of the negative press that Google has attracted lately. And now, they’ve given web developers access to a rich library of AJAX goodies under a generous open source license.
On their new Yahoo! User Interface Blog Nate Koechley announced two new libraries. The Yahoo! Design Patterns Library “offers our thinking on common interface design issues for traditional and rich Internet applications” and the Yahoo! Interface Library “is a collection of industrial-grade JavaScript utilities and widgets.” In both cases, it’s the same code they use to power their own sites.
What will you find? Lots of simple-but-elegant solutions like a Netflix-style click-to-rate pattern. Rather than taking the user to another page or making them jump through hoops to rate something, they just point and click, without leaving or even refreshing the page.
The drag-and-drop modules pattern gives you the ability to create custom modules that users can drag around their page, rearranging content to suit their needs. The navigation tabs pattern gives you a clean, well designed interface for site navigation. These are just a few examples of what you’ll find.
Of course, some developers will argue that they could code these themselves, which is true. So why bother with Yahoo’s libraries at all? Because it let’s you leverage the good work that other people have done and focus your attention on the specific goals of your website or application.
And isn’t that what really matters?
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