Yahoo Gets It
Feb 19, 2006 by
Andre
Eric Miraglia at the Yahoo! User Interface blog talks about creating their JavaScript library. One point he touches on is the hetrogeneity of client configurations, and how that underscored the need for a robust cross-browser toolkit:
Writing JavaScript for dozens of run-time engines and accessing dozens of implementations of DOM methods can be a recipe for paralysis — it naturally leads to conservatism with respect to making commitments for advanced features.He notes that, by some estimates, there are 10,000 (!) different client configurations accessing Yahoo! products. Regardless of whether or not that's accurate (or what constitutes a distinct configuration), I think that Yahoo is the best positioned of anyone to create a real battle-hardened cross-browser toolkit.
Eric also notes similarities between browser-based development today and desktop GUI development a decade ago:
The browser environment today shares significant common ground with where the desktop GUI industry was ten or fifteen years ago: Toolkits are comparatively new, platforms are awkward, and it’s too hard to bridge the gap between a great interactive design and real-world, cross-platform engineering implementation. While part of the problem lies in the fundamental protocols of the web, which was never meant to be a platform for deploying desktop-like applications (at least, not without the help of a Java plugin), a significant part of it lies in the browser itself. Modern browsers are tantalizingly close to making rich application development realizable and robust, but the work is still too hard and the foundation too wobbly. Early Macintosh and Windows developers often felt just this way in the early days of the desktop.Read more at http://yuiblog.com/blog/