I got an email from Eric Miraglia today, who works in Yahoo!‘s Presentation Platform Engineering group. Apparently, Yahoo! has decided to release some of its internal JavaScript libraries to the public, and has released a corresponding blog to help us all keep up: Yahoo! User Interface Blog.

As part of this, Yahoo! has released two JavaScript libraries: a design patterns library and an user interface library. This represents a huge step forward for a major company like Yahoo!, as they are the first big Internet company to release actual code used in their main products into open source.

Now, frequent readers of my blog and/or books know that I have a strong dislike of JavaScript libraries and frameworks, as I believe they are often overly bloated and too specific to certain tasks to be universally useful. It appears that Yahoo! feels the same way, as most parts of these libraries are lightweight and standalone. I hope more people take this to heart and bring about a new era of JavaScript components that don’t require 300K of “core” functionality to be downloaded first.