[Grok-dev] megrok.yui released

[Martin Aspeli]

Wichert Akkerman wrote:

> Ext produces absolutely insane html. I did a simple test with it a while
> ago and creating a simple table produces a DOM with 14 nested divs. It
> is all geared towards trying to build a full windowing system in your
> webpages, which is something you never need. 
> 
> Designed would kill me on site if I ask them to style the result of Ext.

I don't think ExtJS is very useful for public facing "design" things. I 
think it's extremely good for functional, "GUI component" use. Think 
Plone's "edit" tab instead of the "view" tab.

I'm not sure I'd serve ExtJS to an anonymous user, but I've used it very 
successfully for a system that's an "application" much more than it is a 
"site". The components are so rich and so easy to work with that it 
enables a whole new style of development, where all the GUI work is done 
with Java Script and data is passed back and forth using JSON, say. 
Sometimes (by no means all of the time!) that's a lot easier and more 
powerful than doing a hybrid model with lots of page flow and only some 
dynamic elements.

For those uses, you don't need or want to do very radical theming. The 
cleanliness of the HTML is pretty irrelevant, and the default look and 
feel will probably suffice for many (it's pretty unobtrusive).

In any case, I'm not really looking to start a debate here, I was just 
curious about the rationale.

> YUI has the advantage of being extremely well documented. 

True.

Martin

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book