Two things regarding web user interfaces happened to me within the last 24 hours.

First, i stumble upon the blog Jabbering Giraffe (possibly through CSS Mania). On the surface, there’s nothing special about the Jabbering Giraffe user interface (UI) but look closer at the top row. From there, you can “personalize” the display: toggle rendered headline fonts (using sIFR, very nifty), body text size and width (fixed/maximum/flexible-within-sane-limits) and whether the side bar should be placed on the left or on the right. And there is a rather nifty use of symbols –with CSS generated content, i suspect– in conjunction with visited links. What i don’t know (yet) is whether the personalization is persistent, i.e. sticks between sessions. But it’s a purposeful implementation of dynamic HTML nonetheless.

Actually, i don’t know if the DHTML magic originates from Jabbering Giraffe, but i’ll allow him the honour for now.

The second thing i caught from Slashdot: Yahoo! has released a HTML user interface library (“Oh, so i’d want Yahoo!-branded UI components on my site?”, i thinks) as Open source (“Whoa, they’re smarter than i thought!”). That, and a set of HTML UI Patterns.

I haven’t had a look at the UI library yet, but if some of the patterns Yahoo! describes can be realized with the UI lib, i’m happy. At least it contains the backline needed for AJAX connections, drag-and-drop, event handling and page animation. The library also contains more tangible artifacts: a calendar, slider and Tree View component (”widget”). Very welcome! Yahoo! seem to be hinting that they are eating their own dog food, using the same stuff for their own web apps.

I wonder if the UI library is the same one used at Flickr, which employs a bunch of subtle but useful DHTML techniques, like in-place editing (”direct manipulation” in usability-speak) of titles and texts. I hope these components are useful and flexible. If they are, they will provice Yahoo! a lot of good and well-needed web karma that Google has stolen a lot of lately.