YUI FTW!

Despite having been more or less web-native since the mid-90s, I’ve never really done much hands-on web design or javascript programming. Still, I read (and listen to) enough tech stuff to get the general idea. Today I decided I needed to do a little javascript to flip between alternative presentations of some data. So I figured, generate all 3 up-front, put them inside divs, and set the CSS display property for the one I wanted. That much I knew before I started.

Off to look for sample code. I realise that for people who actually do web work that this is the equivalent of “Hello World”, but I still needed a little help. A handful of JS and CSS tutorials later, and I found myself on the Yahoo developer site looking at YUI.

15 minutes later, a fully functioning tabbed widget containing my 3 bits of data, completely integrated with the existing stuff (different display options for diff output, for what it’s worth). I am seriously impressed at how good YUI is for grab-and-go code samples. Would have taken me at least an hour from scratch (yeah, I know, I’m a sysadmin, not a proper programmer).