A+ Ajax

Over at the the YUI blog the team just announced the preview release of YUI 3.2.0. YUI3 now has some interesting new features that the team wants you to try and tell them if they work out for you. The changes to the already very powerful library are quite ambitious:

• Touch event support for mobile interfaces including flick and move gestures
• Browser capability loading – which means that every browser gets the least amount of code necessary to make it work
• Transition support for the animation module – meaning only browsers that don’t support CSS3 transitions get the JavaScript animation fallback
• An update to the CSS grids to allow for more flexible layouts
• A ScrollView widget similar to the one in Apple iOS
• The uploader has been transitioned over from YUI2 to YUI3

So check out what is on offer and give the YUI team feedback on what would be nice to have and what is broken. In their own words:

The goal of a preview release is to make it as easy as possible for all of us in the community to evaluate progress of the upcoming release and provide feedback. Please take some time to test 3.2.0pr1 and let us know what you find by filing tickets in the YUI 3 bug database marked as “Observed in version” 3.2.0pr1. We’ll do our best to address preview-release questions on the YUI 3 Forums, too.

There are three ways to get started with the preview release: YUI 3.2.0pr1 is available on the CDN via the 3.2.0pr1 version tag — so you can reference preview-release files like http://yui.yahooapis.com/combo?3.2.0pr1/build/yui/yui-min.js. If you switch to this seed file for the preview release, all subsequent use() statements will continue to load YUI 3.2.0pr1. Or You can download the full YUI 3.2.0pr1 from YUILibrary.com, including source code and examples for all components. Or you can simply explore the functioning examples roster.

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At MIX, Microsoft showed that they are back in the browser game with a preview of IE9 “platform” (platform seems to mean ‘haven’t got it together as a real browser yet, but we wanted to get it to you guys ASAP’).

Today, they updated the preview as they said they would (claiming they will do new releases every 8 weeks or so).

Table stakes these days is performance. IE8 is so far behind, but the IE team is showing that with IE9 they will be strong contenders:

To go along with this, we haver the GPU story of hardware acceleration. Test drive some new demos such as this Flickr Explorer or the browser flip

There are other tools too:

The Developer Tools in IE9 Platform Preview 2 include new features. The Console window is now a full tab that includes diagnostic information from IE. Developers can use the “Change User Agent String” menu item to experiment with sending different that UA strings to sites with every request, selecting from preset strings or creating their own custom string. This complements another feature we’ve included – the new IE9 UA string. (Steve! Update BrowserScope! :)

This is good timing. Giorgio Sardo of Microsoft is on a browser panel that Ben and I are moderating at Web 2.0 Expo today. The panel has other heavy hitters: Douglas Crockford (Yahoo!), Brendan Eich (Mozilla), Charles McCathieNevile (Opera Software), and Alex Russell (Google). We are going to have some fun :)

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