Since the release earlier this spring we in Web Application Development have been slow transitioning our web designs to incorporate the Yahoo User Interface Library, or YUI for short. The library provides a fantastic array of widgets, styles, and design patterns for keeping development time to a minimum (think: reuse) and consistency high (think: familiarity).
So far we’ve managed to grab tons of milage from the YUI Grids/Fonts/Reset style-sheets (which as of 0.12 have all been conveniently packaged in 1 file). These basic styles serve as a foundation for all of our Rails projects now and as well the web sites we build like the new ADA Committee and the Enterprise Systems Group.
As you can see from the ADA Committee and Enterprise Systems site, I’ve managed to shoehorn in the CSU, Chico templates into a YUI Grids based template. It still has a few kinks to work out, but for the most part it looks pretty darn good. In addition, as Pat mentioned, it was a snap to get the site to pass accessibility checks without having a 1995 inspired nested table mess.
Just as an exercise, I decided to re-implement our Central Authentication Login Page using YUI Grids. The results can be seen here. As you can see, the pages looks almost identical. During the re-implementation I cleaned up some code and made some format modifications and made the text browser-scalable. As Pat points out, YUI Grids lets you worry about the layout and how things look rather than “will this work in IE?” (which it does).
Possibly the nicest part about the YUI Grids is that it only adds 3k in page weight and yet you get grid-based layouts, scalable font sizes, and Grade-A Browser Compatibility (Table of Grade-A browsers)
Having the ability to quickly create grid layouts has been a blessing and will be even more fun in the future having discovered this little gem, the CSS Grid Builder.
The “Corporate Bit” Since we’re not suppose to endorse any company or product, I’d like to point out that there are a lot of other “interface libraries” that could suite your design/development needs. We’ve chosen Yahoo because it was simple, easy to use, flexible, and open source.