Yahoo announced that it is stopping development on the Yahoo User Interface library (YUI). It’s been around since 2005, and was launched to the public the following year.

The library offere developers free, open source JavaScript and CSS tools and utilities for building web apps.

The company says it will no focus its efforts on the “new technology landscape”. New YUI releases will only take place when they’re “absolutely critical” to Yahoo properties, and will be few and far between.

Yahoo says on its engineering blog:

It has become clear to us that the industry is now headed in a new direction. As most of you know, the web platform has been undergoing a drastic transformation over the past few years. JavaScript is now more ubiquitous than ever. The emergence of Node.JS has allowed JavaScript to be used on the server side, opening the door to creating isomorphic single page applications. New package managers (npm, bower) have spurred the rise of an ecosystem of 3rd party, open source, single-purpose tools that complement each other, embracing the UNIX philosophy and enabling very complex development use cases. New build tools (Grunt and its ecosystem of plugins, Broccoli, Gulp) have made it easier to assemble those tiny modules into large, cohesive applications. New application frameworks (Backbone, React, Ember, Polymer, Angular, etc.) have helped architect web applications in a more scalable and maintainable way. New testing tools (Mocha, Casper, Karma, etc.) have lowered the barrier of entry to building a solid continuous delivery pipeline. Standard bodies (W3C, Ecma) are standardizing what the large JavaScript frameworks have brought to the table over the years, making them available natively to a larger number of devices. Finally, browser vendors are now committed to making continuous improvements to their web browsers while aligning more closely with standards. With so called “evergreen web browsers”, which are making it easier for users to run the latest stable version of a web browser, we can expect a significant reduction in the amount of variance across user agents.

The consequence of this evolution in web technologies is that large JavaScript libraries, such as YUI, have been receiving less attention from the community. Many developers today look at large JavaScript libraries as walled gardens they don’t want to be locked into. As a result, the number of YUI issues and pull requests we’ve received in the past couple of years has slowly reduced to a trickle. Most core YUI modules do not have active maintainers, relying instead on a slow stream of occasional patches from external contributors. Few reviewers still have the time to ensure that the patches submitted are reviewed quickly and thoroughly.

The company says the team behind the YUI will continue to work on next-generation presentation technologies, and will initially focus on internal developers.

Image via Yahoo