paul bennett

I’ve been using components of the YUI framework for a while now and have been really impressed with the depth and breadth of what it enables you to do. I was pretty convinced I’d stick with YUI for a good while….until today.

Now, I’d heard about jQuery a lot but had never taklen a decent look at it. I decided to after reading Cameron Moll’s latest post in his ‘the highly extensible interface’ series. I had a nice challenge for it too. I needed to recreate our sites navigation using way cleaner mark-up and unobtrusive JavaScript to replace the existing ‘tables-and-document.write’ nightmare.

To cut a long story short, I was able to not only recreate but also improve the navigation and it all took only 2 hours and about 50 lines of code. All I ended up with a solution which was less than a quarter the size of the original but supported more browsers and (in my opinion) had a more satisfying behaviour.

Seriously, a framework which makes things this easy and yet is so powerful deserves a lot of praise. Even after being reasonably familiar with YUI, I believe it wouyld have taken me around three times as long to get a working solution using ther YUI components. Remember – this was the first time I’d ever used jQuery

jQuery, I’m converted.