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.
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
> 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.
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.