Yahoo's Valentine to the Web came a day early

Back from Northern Voice and beautiful British Columbia just as Yahoo! does a wonderful thing -- we've just opened up two libraries of handy stuff for designers and developers:

Yahoo! Design Patterns -- our thinking on common interface design issues for traditional and rich Internet applications.

Yahoo! User Interface Library -- industrial-grade JavaScript utilities and widgets that enable you to efficiently get the most out of today’s powerful browsers.

Big congratulations to my pal and coworker Nate Koechley -- one of the voices of the brand new Yahoo! User Interface Blog, an early bloom in Yahoo's spring crop of blogs. Nate's keeping company with Ajax evangelist Bill "Looks Good Works Well" Scott,  and I can't wait to see who else shows up. These guys are part of a quietly rising tide of clueful thinking about the developer community. We get it that designers and developers are the essential stewards of the web-- and that we all shape each other as we march on building out this vast and curious metaverse.

Believe me, it's not just Bill and Nate. There's a passionate team of developers who understand that:

It's about SHARING.
It's about CHANGE.
It's about PARTICIPATION.
It's about a VISION.

To paraphrase Christopher Alexander, it's about "a timeless way of building" for web development and design.

This has nothing to do with good and evil. We're not talking about moral imperatives. We're talking about conversation, common sense, culture not consumption. This is the Yahoo I'm proud to be part of.  The gesture that started on February 13, 2006 with the release of 13 patterns is our lagniappe (a word i've been longing to use), a different way to say "Be Mine" to an audience we really do love to hang with.  (you know who you are)