[MTOS-dev] [ProNet] Javascript Library Standardization

[Niall Kennedy]

   I use YUI on my sites, including a YUI RTE in my blog's comments.  
Code is BSD licensed and you are free to host it on your own servers,  
ship in your software, or serve from Yahoo!'s CDN. The library is  
under active development as Yahoo uses the tools every day.

   Usually when someone says JS "doesn't sit well with other libs"  
they are concerned about interfering event listeners or improper  
namespacing. I haven't had that issue on my sites.

   I presume you are bringing up the topic due to the pluggable RTEs  
available in 4.1? YUI RTE lib author Dav Glass maintains a WordPress  
plugin to replace TinyMCE [1]. We could easily port it to MTOS based  
on my existing work.

-Niall Kennedy


[1] http://blog.davglass.com/files/yui/wp-yui-rte/


On Jan 23, 2008, at 1:18 PM, Chad Everett wrote:

> Moving to mtos-dev, per Byrne...
>
> I have to say that I actually don't like YUI.
>
> It is an advantage that it doesn't come from your own servers, I  
> guess, so bandwidth is a potential savings, but it does come from  
> somewhere, meaning your clients are going to have to get it.  If  
> you're worried about bandwidth that much, then it could be an  
> issue.  You could use expires headers and versioning to take care of  
> that to some degree if you really care that much.  And from what  
> I've seen in my limited testing, YUI sucks - both in terms of the  
> amount of bandwidth it uses and in the usability.
>
> I'm not a JavaScript pro by any means, but in a simple comparison  
> test over Lightbox implementations, Prototype was the far-and-away  
> most common implementation.  I eventually settled on Mootools for my  
> personal solution [1], because I liked it for what I could do with  
> it.  Later, I adapted AjaxRating to use Mootools, meaning I stripped  
> down AjaxRating's size, which saved me some bandwidth (though this  
> was probably evened out because I had to add Ajax libraries into  
> Mootools to do it).  Mootools is distributed packed by default,  
> which I like, and it plays nice with about everything.  There are  
> some exceptions that I personally have found [2], but it does work  
> well and even though I don't do much JavaScript, I have had no  
> problems picking it up.
>
> Prototype, in my experience with Lightbox, is big.  Really big.   
> Yes, you can compress it/pack it, but it still comes in larger than  
> Mootools, if not by much.  The jQuery implementation of Lightbox  
> didn't have the features I decided I wanted, so I didn't go with it,  
> but it seemed to be of a similar size - and I have seen that it's  
> fairly well-regarded.  YUI, on the other hand, had a horrible  
> Lightbox implementation and didn't do what I wanted anyway.  Plus it  
> was slow.  I don't know if it was compressed or not, but delivery  
> was worse than if it came from my servers - I would expect more from  
> someone like Yahoo!
>
> [1] http://jayseae.cxliv.org/2007/12/27/enhancing_the_display_of_images_on_your_site_with_slimbox.php
> [2] http://jayseae.cxliv.org/2007/12/21/easily_add_ratings_to_your_site_with_outbrain.php#comment-239211
>
> --
> Chad Everett
> Everitz Consulting
>
>
> Su wrote:
>>
>> I think YUI is the one that doesn't sit well on the same page as  
>> other libs, which would be a big minus, as it's not only plugins  
>> that are going to potentially be including them but direct user  
>> manipulation of templates.
>>
>> It's much more likely that someone is going to add jQuery/Prototype  
>> (cf. Lightbox and Thickbox for obvious examples) than YUI.
>>
>> It also seems to have a tendency to get huge once you start adding  
>> modules.