First of all, you may wonder what the hell is going on with this blogger's obsession with Accordion widgets, probably because I already wrote about this and then another time with several improvements to what I did in the first article. I'll explain why at the end of this entry. First let's get to the stuff that really matters!

try it out here!

July 30 update: MASSIVE improvements galore! The highlights of this new version are:

• Added custom events
• Added more interesting examples
• Added new methods: AccordionView:openPanel and AccordionView:closePanel to manipulate panels from elsewhere in your code.
• Added a configurable timeout for hover-activated accordions
• Various small bugfixes

The demo / download page has been updated.

Many thanks fo out to Satyam, the author of this awesome article on building YUI widgets for all his valuable advice over the past few days. Without his excellent knowledge this widget wouldn't be half as good as it is now. Thanks a lot Satyam!

If you're interested in modifying or creating YUI widgets, his article "Building Your Own Widget Library with YUI" is an absolute MUST read!

Tags: photoblog, template, premium template, design, webdesign, photography

This isn't really a full blown article but just some random thoughts and an invitation to some discussion. I'm very interested in how fellow web developers are feeling about the matter I'm about to bring up.

I feel I've come a long way in web development even if I say so myself. After having developed primarily backend oriented websites in the pre-CSS era I've embraced modern web development and gradually managed to get at a level I feel is pretty much 'expert level'. In my professional life I'm working with awesome people. They are all at this same expert level where you can pretty much get anything you want done. Some things will take a bit more time, some a bit less, but you'll get it done. And if given the time to do so, done WELL too. Done WELL in my opinion means: proper semantic markup, a strict separation of markup, style and behaviours, proper care about accessibility, maintainable code, good performance, anyway, I could go on. I'm probably preaching to the choir with this anyway. The bottom line, sometimes I feel like me and my fellow web developers are on some sort of isolated island with no proper communication lines to the outside world except for the bare necessary messages.

The thing I'm really concerned about is how many people (clients, companies, employers / managers) actually care about things being done WELL. Some often heard phrases:

What do you mean users who don't have javascript? Everybody has javascript!

You know what? First get this product out of the door and we'll worry about accessibility / non-javascript users / SEO later! (read: never)

This (badly done) site works fine! What could be wrong with it? I think you have an attitude problem young man!

Accessibility? You mean for blind people and stuff? Don't worry, we don't mind if the blind people can't look at our products. I don't even think blind people have interest in our work.

We'll just do something like <div onclick="handleEverything()"><failsome b-value='name:joe;age=47;'>datablock</failsome><div> and it will all work! What do you mean that's not valid? It works in all browsers I know! And what the hell is unobtrusive Javascript? Stop complaining so much!

The list goes on and on. So... how many potential clients / employers that YOU work for actually care about the quality of what's being built for them? And what do you feel the perceived value of a quality frontend developer is these days? Does our expertise really MATTER?

I'm interested in your thoughts!

I've been meaning to write this article for quite a long time. By now I can safely say I have extensive experience with various different Javascript frameworks and I can therefore now express my preference. Now before I get started the following: You may think I'm heavily biased because I happen to work for Yahoo! when it comes to my preference for YUI. In a certain sense this is true, but not in the sense most people will think.

The only influence my job at Yahoo has had on all this is the simple fact that working there exposed me to how great YUI really is. This is something that a lot of you may not realise yet, for the simple reason that you've never REALLY looked at it. When looking around on the web for Javascript frameworks it never seemed to be the popular option. I don't have any numbers to back up this claim but for some reason I haven't seen all that many tutorial sites, open source projects using it or blogs writing about it when compared to JQuery, Prototype.js or even Dojo. In short: Yahoo made me get to know YUI and fall in love with it.