This: Yahoo! User Interface Library has to be the beginning of the future of UIs on the web. Back in the old days when I used to program with the MFC, the two things I loved about Microsoft’s ubiquity were that I had a choice of ready-to-use controls/widgets/components at my fingertips that I could easily stick into my application to give it complex behaviour and the fact that if I chose to thus stick, everyone knew how to use it. Java came along (ignoring the disastrous AWT) and sort of made it work (again). Mostly the behaviour was what you expected, but then sometimes. Ah, sometimes. The early days of the web were OK - it was just tables after all. But then the fatal promise of Javascript and DHTML loomed. Suddenly it was roll-your-own time again. And it still is. Years and years later.
I can’t begin to describe how tired I am as a user of struggling with yet another calendar widget on yet another budget travel site. Is it going to pop up with a month view? Will it show me the current date? Will it insert the date if I click it? Or is it just advisory, showing me which days of the week my 1 euro flight is really available on (none).
It’s not that I blame the poor UI developers. The first time you get lumbered with working on a webapp with complex client-side behaviour, you discover that nobody is out there to help you. Or rather everyone is… You want to add a tree control? MFC/Java/.NET apps?, TCL/TK? - no problem. Webapp - take a look at Webmonkey, they have something interesting. It sort of works. Then there’s a bunch of developers with really neat open source controls - how about them? Or how about ASP.NET, Struts, Tapestry…? Hang on, I just wanted a tree I could click and now I have to use a whole framework? (Yes I realize that MFC required a whole OS, but somehow that didn’t feel as bad as a framework. The OS was just kind of there hanging around doing nothing after all.) I’m back in UI pre-history, so what will I do? Take something that sort of works and adapt it so it does. YAWPUS. Yet another widget for the poor users to struggle with.
What I would dearly love to see is industry heavyweights getting together, feeling the love, knocking out some standard components that are so great that UI developers will flock to use them, thus taking the weight off my brain when all I want to do is buy cheap tickets. So as Nat on O’Reilly Radar said “Kudos to Yahoo!”.