yahoo user interface tools
I’m a year late but better late than never eh. I stumbled upon this while looking for layout ideas. Yahoo have released lots of their API’s and widgets and many other tools to the publice since February 2006. Where the hell have I been? But I don’t think I would have understood any of it last year.
They have layout tools and ready made css files that have been tested in what they call "a–grade" browsers. And they widths all correspond to online advertising standards, so that it makes it easy to implement banner ads of all shapes and sizes. There are tutorials too, so you can’t go wrong. They are called css grids because most design is grid based. You can choose from fixed width to liquid. And if you want to change your width to a custom size that they don’t have then they tell you how do that without messing up the css files and get the whole cross browser thing happening.
There is also nesting which allows you to sub divide the large content areas into smaller ones. Again they show you how to do that and give you some options. There is also a css font control using percentages and a table to go from percentages to ems. And a thing called css reset which is basically a css file that resets the browsers default stylesheet so that you can start from scratch.
Then there are the whole host of widgets like calendar, weather, menu etc. These are a little beyond me but are javascript blocks that you can host on your server and call from your page using the script tags. All those groovy tools that are available in Yahoo Mail Beta. These are for non commercial use only. But they aren’t too strict about it but say that they may charge you for their use at some point.
All of these tools are free at the moment, so get downloading as they may not be free for very long. Any time saver is a good thing when you have deadlines to meet. And when something of this pedigree is up for grabs one can’t miss out.
December 29th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
[…] (If you haven’t seen that you should check it out. I wrote another post all about it yahoo developers network.) What they do is to zero out all the elements at the top of the sheet. Which is great because it […]