Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Free is usually good. I learned that from sunsets, loose change between sofa cushions and those few neighbor's tangerines that hang over into my yard. So, it's hard to top something like the Yahoo User Interface libraries being given away for free. Amazingly, Nate over at YDN managed to do it anyway.

What they're doing is offering up the same YUI libraries we use to anyone who wants them. To use them, simply include the paths to the served files in your application.

A few quick notes about this, and why this is better than free.
1) You don't have to serve them. Heck, with any luck, folks will already have these files cached up on their machine and your page load will be lightning fast.
2) They're always out there. What I mean by that is the servers are actually handled by doing remote load balancing. That means that there aren't two or three boxes hosting these, there are thousands of them. Plus, thanks to a bit of DNS wizardry, you (or the folks that use your page) will get the box that's the closest to them. If that box/datacenter/whatever is having a bad hair day, they're automatically routed to the next closest one.
3) You control the version This is actually kinda key. If the YUI folks come out with some new system that shreds whatever you've based your site on, you don't have to worry about losing it all. The way this stuff works, once it's out there it's really hard to change or remove. I know this because there's been a few times when I really wished I could do that and had to work around it. Absolutely wonderful at forcing you to make sure you get it right the first time.

That's what I mean by "cheaper than free".

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