Yahoo! UI JavaScript Library Updated: Now Served with Grids CSS

JavaScriptSearch
Thursday, May 11, 2006; 06:21 AM

Yahoo! Developer Network released an update to their free Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) JavaScript library.  The announcement was made on the official YUI blog at http://yuiblog.com/blog/.

All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses. Downloads are available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/yui/.

The update to YUI introduces a set of new JavaScript-powered user interface components. Most notably, the library now includes components for generating mouse- and keyboard-accessible hierarchical menu systems based on semantically-correct unordered lists in the HTML code.

Also, the library now includes CSS stylesheets in addition to the JavaScript code. CSS Reset smooths out the many differences between the default styles applied to HTML elements in current browsers, thereby providing a common baseline for you to apply your own styles to. CSS Fonts provides predefined font family groups and font sizes that work reliably and consistently across current platforms.

The most important CSS addition, CSS Page Grids, drastically simplifies the task of CSS page layout.  Grids CSS is a suite of seven web page templates and the ability to nest grids of one to four columns within the content area of those templates. Together, the combined template and grid system offers these features:

• Full A-grade browser support
• More than 100 page layouts with a single CSS file at just 1.82KB
• Flexible scaling with user font-size adjustments
• Min-width enforcement, regardless of font or viewport size (except IE; helper JS under consideration)
• Abundant DOM hooks for CSS and scripting flexibility
• Source-order independence, allowing you to place your most important body content first in your HTML document
• Self-clearing footer (no matter which column is longer, the footer stays at the bottom)
• Centering within the viewport by default
• Forward-compatibility as standard page structure evolves to claim more screen real estate
• Accommodation for IAB Advertising Units