kuniform

I began a post on this yesterday, then got busy and forgot to finish it or even save it as a draft. On ol’ St. Valentine’s Day, the folks at Yahoo! released their design pattern library, a user interface code library, and a blog detailing both efforts. Yahoo! kind to interaction designers, not so kind to Chinese dissidents. Ok, enough with the smart-assedness. That is an amazing effort put together by the Yahoo! team. Congrats to the authors of the blog, Bill Scott and Erin Malone on the design team side. Congrats to all there, but I am giving shout outs to those folks in particular since I’ve followed a bunch of their work in my own research.

This is a huge step forward in standardizing the web experience. Is Yahoo! positioning themselves to be the Microsoft of the web API? I believe that is how valuable these patterns, findings, and code could become if their usage is widespread. Owning developer mindshare cannot be overstated—look at how Ruby on Rails is thriving, or witness Joel Spolsky blogging about Microsoft losing the API war to get a sense of the impact.

Anyhoo, more on Ajax frameworks and integration, as well as an interesting Ajax architecture post in a bit. I am going to keep digging through this Yahoo! API today.