5 ms·

Finally, someone there said it. They own many of the top content properties on the internet and they are very profitable (not as profitable as they could be, b

Finally, someone there said it. They own many of the top content properties on the internet and they are very profitable (not as profitable as they could be, but pretty darn profitable). Sure they could have bought Google, Facebook, or any of the other companies that ended up being the top of search or social networking, but they didn't. So it makes sense to play in the games where they're successful. It's like saying Michael Phelps isn't also a great athlete because he can't beat Usain Bolt in the 100 meter. Or vice versa. Google's content properties universally have failed to make a dent against Yahoo's strengths. So Google can't be the Yahoo of content and Yahoo can't be the Google of search. We should be okay with that. At some point the market needs to stop judging them on what they might have been, and see what they actually are and might become.

terpua 17y ago
Hallelujah! Thank you.
tybris 17y ago
Seems like Yahoo! is starting to regain some goodwill. Maybe developers will also start to realise how insanely awesome their APIs are. http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html
- rjurney 17y ago
  Look at Pig's docs compared to Hive's... Yahoo is amazing to the FOSS community and deserves mucho goodwill.
- warfangle 17y ago
  I've always wondered why jQuery (and prototype) are the default javascript libraries for many people. The YUI library is fast, featureful, and maintained by some of the best JS devs in the industry (sorry resig, but I think Crockford knows a little bit more about JS than you). Is it because Yahoo! isn't a "cool" company? Is it because RoR is so tightly coupled to prototype? Is it because they had kind of an unwieldy namespace before they updated that? I find their XHR, event, and dom manipulation interfaces much easier to work with than prototype or jQuery - these are good until you need to do some serious heavy lifting. I've had several instances where I had to create XHRs manually because prototype just didn't give me the access I needed.
  - bmelton 17y ago
    In my experience, it's because the YUI framework is 30Mb with docs, 10Mb without. If I need 10Mb of support tools to make my app do cool stuff, I feel like I'm leaning too much on the framework, and too little on my own capabilities.
    - warfangle 17y ago
      Except you can pick and choose. If all you want is the dom-util-event stuff, it's 36KB unminified. That's the core, and it gets you more features and a more sane API than the 32KB unminified prototype.js. Of course, adding animation on adds weight in both libraries. Tacking on scriptaculous core + effects tacks on an additional 44kb. Tacking on YUI's animation and effects package tacks on 48KB of more featureful and sane API. If you want the entire (slow, buggy, and not very cross-platform) scriptaculous library loaded, prepare to load up 156KB. tl;dr: unminified, YUI-dom-event + animation is 84KB unminified. Prototype + Scriptaculous is 76KB unminified. YUI is faster, has a more sane API, more features, doesn't pollute the global namespace, and doesn't insanely swallow and mute errors. Oh, yeah, and it has better API documentation.... (sidenote: YUI framework is 10mb without docs, but that includes: minified, unminified, unit tests, and a metric shit-ton [technical term] of plugins. Of course, if you're going with prototype or jQuery, you've got to scour the 'net looking for plugins that do the same thing. They come packaged with YUI.)
  - jeresig 17y ago
    Crockford doesn't work on YUI - but he does work at Yahoo. I will fully concede that he may know more about ECMAScript than me - but I will happily challenge him on JavaScript + DOM any day :-) Quite seriously though, since jQuery and YUI came out at nearly the same time back in early 2006 - I feel that it has to do with the simplicity of the jQuery API and the active community that's grown around jQuery. YUI has always had better documentation (even though jQuery's has been good), so that can't be it. A couple points: - You can always do more complicated work with simple APIs but it's fundamentally harder to do simple work with more complex APIs. - YUI didn't promote external plugins or development communities. For example the ExtJS library that grew up based upon YUI was left to stagnate and grow on its own rather than become part of YUI itself. If the YUI team worked to bring Jack Slocum on board YUI would be in a much more dominant position than what it is now. - YUI has been closed to outside contributions for most of its life. No bug tracker, no outside patches, etc. It's only recently that they've truly Open Sourced both the code and the process surrounding the library. I do find it to be odd, as well - YUI really should be more popular than it is. It's well written, well documented, and is well maintained. Even after all of that its market share is shrinking. http://google.com/trends?q=jquery+javascript%2C+yui+javascript http://google.com/trends?q=jquery+javascript%2C+yui+javascri...

terpua 17y ago

Hallelujah! Thank you.

tybris 17y ago

Seems like Yahoo! is starting to regain some goodwill. Maybe developers will also start to realise how insanely awesome their APIs are. http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html

rjurney 17y ago
Look at Pig's docs compared to Hive's... Yahoo is amazing to the FOSS community and deserves mucho goodwill.
warfangle 17y ago
I've always wondered why jQuery (and prototype) are the default javascript libraries for many people. The YUI library is fast, featureful, and maintained by some of the best JS devs in the industry (sorry resig, but I think Crockford knows a little bit more about JS than you). Is it because Yahoo! isn't a "cool" company? Is it because RoR is so tightly coupled to prototype? Is it because they had kind of an unwieldy namespace before they updated that? I find their XHR, event, and dom manipulation interfaces much easier to work with than prototype or jQuery - these are good until you need to do some serious heavy lifting. I've had several instances where I had to create XHRs manually because prototype just didn't give me the access I needed.
- bmelton 17y ago
  In my experience, it's because the YUI framework is 30Mb with docs, 10Mb without. If I need 10Mb of support tools to make my app do cool stuff, I feel like I'm leaning too much on the framework, and too little on my own capabilities.
  - warfangle 17y ago
    Except you can pick and choose. If all you want is the dom-util-event stuff, it's 36KB unminified. That's the core, and it gets you more features and a more sane API than the 32KB unminified prototype.js. Of course, adding animation on adds weight in both libraries. Tacking on scriptaculous core + effects tacks on an additional 44kb. Tacking on YUI's animation and effects package tacks on 48KB of more featureful and sane API. If you want the entire (slow, buggy, and not very cross-platform) scriptaculous library loaded, prepare to load up 156KB. tl;dr: unminified, YUI-dom-event + animation is 84KB unminified. Prototype + Scriptaculous is 76KB unminified. YUI is faster, has a more sane API, more features, doesn't pollute the global namespace, and doesn't insanely swallow and mute errors. Oh, yeah, and it has better API documentation.... (sidenote: YUI framework is 10mb without docs, but that includes: minified, unminified, unit tests, and a metric shit-ton [technical term] of plugins. Of course, if you're going with prototype or jQuery, you've got to scour the 'net looking for plugins that do the same thing. They come packaged with YUI.)
- jeresig 17y ago
  Crockford doesn't work on YUI - but he does work at Yahoo. I will fully concede that he may know more about ECMAScript than me - but I will happily challenge him on JavaScript + DOM any day :-) Quite seriously though, since jQuery and YUI came out at nearly the same time back in early 2006 - I feel that it has to do with the simplicity of the jQuery API and the active community that's grown around jQuery. YUI has always had better documentation (even though jQuery's has been good), so that can't be it. A couple points: - You can always do more complicated work with simple APIs but it's fundamentally harder to do simple work with more complex APIs. - YUI didn't promote external plugins or development communities. For example the ExtJS library that grew up based upon YUI was left to stagnate and grow on its own rather than become part of YUI itself. If the YUI team worked to bring Jack Slocum on board YUI would be in a much more dominant position than what it is now. - YUI has been closed to outside contributions for most of its life. No bug tracker, no outside patches, etc. It's only recently that they've truly Open Sourced both the code and the process surrounding the library. I do find it to be odd, as well - YUI really should be more popular than it is. It's well written, well documented, and is well maintained. Even after all of that its market share is shrinking. http://google.com/trends?q=jquery+javascript%2C+yui+javascript http://google.com/trends?q=jquery+javascript%2C+yui+javascri...