JavaScript

YUI 2.3 was released and sports several new components plus improvements to existing features. Most notable in my opinion is the addition of RTE or rich text editor. The RTE looks nice and is extensible, just like TinyMCE editor.

Also of note is the addition of YUI Base CSS which extends YUI Reset and Font. Base CSS brings back basic size and spacing styles for headings, paragraphs, lists, and other HTML elements that are stripped by YUI Reset. Base CSS provides a great set of styles that look great and are easy to apply.

It's common practice to skip the use of elements in simple forms. The most common example of this are site search forms. The following example uses a JavaScript event handler attribute to clear the input's value which also serves as the input's label.

Although my JavaScript development focus is currently on the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) I do try to keep up with some of the other libraries. Here I'll begin to offer up my recent notes and observations on five popular projects, Dojo, Ext JS, jQuery, Moo Tools, Prototype/Scriptaculous, and YUI.

Gallery 3's core themes use the Superfish menu plugin for jQuery. Superfish provides very nice multi-level dropdown menus, but it does not include support for RTL languages.

I had started a post highlighting the recent Eclipse PDT 2.0 release but now find myself dropping the post and the Eclipse IDE altogether. Instead, I'll share why I've switched from Eclipse PDT to NetBeans.