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The New Yahoo! Homepage and YUI 3

by Nicholas Zakas on Jan 19, 2009

A brief talk given at the San Francisco JavaScript Meetup about why the new Yahoo! homepage decided to use YUI 3 instead of YUI 2.

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Over the past couple of years, we've seen JavaScript development earn recognition as a true discipline. The idea that you should architect your code, use patterns and good programming practices has really elevated the role of the front end engineer. In my opinion, part of this elevation has been the adoption of what has traditionally been considered back end methodologies. We now focus on performance and algorithms, there's unit testing for JavaScript, and so much more. One of the areas that I've seen a much slower than adoption that I'd like is in the area of error handling. How many people have an error handling strategy for their backend? How many have dashboards that display problems with uptime and performance? How many have anything similar for the front end? Typically, the front end has been this black hole of information. You may get a few customer reports here and there, but you have no information about what's going on, how often it's occurring, or how many people have been affected.

Axel Goodman at RiZM design Tags yahoo 5 months ago
Christina Wodtke at Consulting, Investing, Advising, Talking, Teaching Tags yahoo 6 months ago
alexmiao 11 months ago
Omid Monshizadeh, Front End Developer at Somewhere Tags yui 3 years ago
Adam Lu, Web Frontend Engineer at Yahoo! 3 years ago
yatender 4 years ago
JFMarti at nealite Tags yahoo 4 years ago
JohnLogi Tags dark background 4 years ago
Daniele Nascimento, Researcher at Osaka City University 4 years ago

The New Yahoo! Homepage and YUI 3.0 Nicholas C. Zakas Principal Front End Engineer, Yahoo!
1996
1997
1999
2002
2004
2006 YUI 2
Homepage Stats
- 300 million unique users worldwide per month
- 100 million unique users in the United States per month
2008 YUI 3
Goals
- Eliminate global dependencies
- Make it small, make it fast
- Create version independence
- Allow code portability
Eliminate Global Dependencies
- YAHOO
- YAHOO.util
- YAHOO.util.Dom
- YAHOO.util.Event
- YAHOO.My
- YAHOO.My.Namespace
Dependencies:
Eliminate Global Dependencies
Make It Small, Make It Fast
- YUI 2.6.0
- dragdrop.js (24 KB)
- YUI 3.0 PR1
Make It Small, Make It Fast
Create Version Independence
Allow Code Portability
Be Forward Compatible
3 > 2
Etcetera
- My blog: www.nczonline.net
- My email: [email_address]
- Twitter: @slicknet
- YUI 3: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3/