Yahoo has stopped work on its Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) project because of the rise of technologies such as Node.js.

YUI is an open source JavaScript and CSS library for building interactive web applications, and has been under development since 2005. In a post on the Yahoo Engineering blog about the decision to cease development, Julien Lecomte, Director of Engineering, Yahoo Presentation Technologies said that

“YUI is an important part of Yahoo’s history: millions of lines of code relying on YUI have been written and are still in use at Yahoo today.”

Some of the ideas from YUI such as modules and dynamic loading have become widely used, but the library itself has never been a world beater. As JavaScript has become increasingly the choice of web developers, YUI has become less relevant.

Lecomte points out that the emergence of Node.JS has allowed JavaScript to be used on the server side, opening the door to creating isomorphic single page applications. Add in the growth of package managers that mean standalone tools can be used together; better build tools and application frameworks, and the result is a market that no longer needs YUI.

He adds that browser vendors are now committed to making continuous improvements to their web browsers while aligning more closely with standards, concluding that

“with so called ‘evergreen web browsers’, which are making it easier for users to run the latest stable version of a web browser, we can expect a significant reduction in the amount of variance across user agents.”

All this means that large JavaScript libraries such as YUI are becoming irrelevant to developers, and from now

“new YUI releases will likely be few and far between, and will only contain targeted fixes that are absolutely critical to Yahoo properties.”

YUI is currently at version 3.17.2 and is still available for use.

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