Book Image

YUI 2.8: Learning the Library

Book Image

YUI 2.8: Learning the Library

Overview of this book

The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls written in JavaScript for building Rich Internet Applications, across all major browsers and independently of any server technology. There's a lot of functionality baked into YUI, but getting to and understanding that functionality is not for the faint of heart. This book gives you a clear picture of YUI through a step-by-step approach, packed with lots of examples.YUI 2.8: Learning the Library covers all released (non-beta) components of the YUI 2.8 Library in detail with plenty of working examples, looking at the classes that make up each component and the properties and methods that can be used. It includes a series of practical examples to reinforce how each component should/can be used, showing its use to create complex, fully featured, cross-browser, Web 2.0 user interfaces. It has been updated from its first edition with the addition of several chapters covering several new controls and enriched with lots of experience of using them.You will learn to create a number of powerful JavaScript controls that can be used straightaway in your own applications. Besides giving you a deep understanding of the YUI library, this book will expand your knowledge of object-oriented JavaScript programming, as well as strengthen your understanding of the DOM and CSS. The final chapter describes many of the tools available to assist you the developer in debugging, maintaining, and ensuring the best quality in your code. In this new edition, all the examples have been updated to use the most recent coding practices and style and new ones added to cover newer components. Since the basic documentation for the library is available online, the focus is on providing insight and experience.The authors take the reader from beginner to advanced-level YUI usage and understanding.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
YUI 2.8 Learning the Library
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

Summary


The CSS Tools are the smallest and without doubt the easiest component of the library to use, but their contribution in the form of time-saving and functionality provided is no less than that of the utilities and controls.

First the Reset CSS Tool provides normalization services to the most common HTML elements so that borders, margins, and padding, among other things, are set to zero across all of the most common browsers.

The Base CSS Tool then builds upon the level foundation provided by Resets to give certain elements back some of the styling that marks them out from other elements. This tool is the only one that isn't part of the minified aggregated resets-fonts-grids.css file.

Next, all of your page text is standardized to the Arial font and is given a fixed line height. Sizes are also fixed to a consistent size across the document with the Fonts CSS Tool.

Finally, the precise layout of your page can be declared through the use of a range of CSS classes, IDs, and templates defined...