YUI Theater

Nate Koechley, one of Yahoo's original frontend engineers, teaches about the foundations of the discipline and its best practices.

John Resig of Mozilla, creator of the jQuery library, discusses modern JavaScript and DOM programming.

Nicole Sullivan discusses best practices for implementing fast, beautiful websites.

Douglas Crockford discusses the application of Ajax techniques in making websites more performant.

Yahoo! engineer and YUI accessibility specialist Todd Kloots provides an introduction to development using the emerging ARIA specification.

Yahoo! engineer and YUI Test developer Nicholas C. Zakas provides an introduction to the concepts of test-driven development (TDD) and shows how to apply them to frontend engineering using YUI Test.

Yahoo! JavaScript Architect Douglas Crockford argues that to take the web forward we need to look back -- to the days of the great browser wars when innovation lit up the web. Standards have stagnated, and only a new browser war can break us loose from the current rut.

Eric Miraglia and Matt Sweeney of the YUI Team at Yahoo take you through the architecture of YUI 3, the next-generation codeline of the YUI Library. YUI 3 is currently available as a public preview at http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3.

Dav Glass, author of the YUI Rich Text Editor, introduces you to the YUI RTE, its common use cases, and its hooks for customization in this April 2008 tech talk

Nate Koechley is the author of the YUI Library's CSS components — Reset, Fonts, Grids, and Base. Nate has been at Yahoo since 2001 where he was among the first pure web developers. During the past six years, he's helped guide the formation of a vibrant frontend discipline at Yahoo built around a commitment to professionalism, standards, and performance. In 2005, Nate was among the first engineers to join the YUI team and he was instrumental in making YUI available as a free open-source project in 2006. In addition to engineering our CSS components, Nate has been one of our most visible contributors at conferences, where he's spokeon on a wide range of frontend engineering topics. In this 40-minute presentation, Nate takes you on a detailed tour of the YUI CSS foundation, its philosophy, and its usage.

PPK is one of the best-known figures in the world of frontend engineering because over the years he has tirelessly tilted against the windmills of browser quirks. His quirksmode blog has the canonical articles on many subjects; for example, if you want to find out how events differ across browsers, PPK's event compatibility tables are an essential reference. Having the patience to do the research and the generosity to share his findings have been the hallmarks of PPK's work as a blogger-engineer. In what looks to be an even more significant second act, PPK has recently embarked on a project to create a professional organization for frontend engineers in his native Holland. The organization is called "Fronteers" (frontend engineers); he has documented the project on his blog and has more recently been out at conferences speaking to his fellow frontend engineers about the concept. At Nate's invitation, PPK stopped by Yahoo! last week to tell us about Fronteers and its intended role in professionalizing the discipline in Holland. PPK was kind enough to allow us to record the event and share it on YUI Theater. If you have comments or questions about the Fronteers concept, I'm sure he'd love to hear from you in the comments here or on his own blog.

Steve Souders is Yahoo's chief peformance guru and the author of High Performance Web Sites. For the past three years, Steve has led a team investigating the root causes of poor page performance and applying the lessons learned to Yahoo!'s high-traffic, media-rich properties.

Yahoo! Engineer Matt Mlinac introduces you to the YUI ImageLoader Utility.

Joe Hewitt, co-founder of the Firefox project and author of the popular Firebug extension to Firefox, stopped by Yahoo! last week to talk about his latest creation: the iUI JavaScript/CSS library that allows developers to build web applications that emulate the visual language native iPhone applications. In this 15-minute presentation, Joe provides an overview of how iUI works and how you can use it to jumpstart any iPhone-specific interfaces you're considering for your web apps. He also provides an outstanding overview of just what you can expect from the current iPhone web browser in terms of standards support; if you're curious about what works and what doesn't with iPhone's Safari implementation, this is a good place to start.

Douglas Crockford provided a keynote talk for the 2007 Konfabulator Developer Day yesterday. His talk was entitled "Javascript: The Good Parts" — a topic of interest to Konfabulator hackers, much of whose work is done in JavaScript. This talk, now one of five talks from Douglas up on the YUI Theater, is the most reflective one we've covered. Douglas takes you on a journey through the lens of his own personal experience with JavaScript — a journey from deep skepticism about a flawed, half-baked scripting language in the earliest days to a growing affection for what is now a still-flawed but surprisingly beautiful and powerful language that has "radically changed my way of thinking about programming languages."