The Yahoo User Interface (YUI) framework has been updated to be faster with extra features.

Developers at Yahoo's YUI project released version 3.7.0 of the open source JavaScript and CSS web library at the end of August. Since then there has been a quick follow up release, 3.7.1, to correct encoding problems encountered by users self-hosting YUI and serving it with a non-UTF-8 encoding. Currently 3.7.2 is in the works.

YUI is used for Yahoo’s front page, and is designed for developers wanting to create interactive web applications.

According to a blog post about the new version, Yahoo plans to release a production-ready version of YUI at the end of each development sprint (which usually lasts one month.)

The main improvement in version 3.7  is faster performance of the Event Utility, which the developers say will be up to three times faster thanks to optimisations of memory and runtime.

The way gestures are handled has been improved so that the event-flick and event-move gestures now use MSPointer events.

Graphics and Charts have been improved. Scrolling has received several changes. There’s a new node-scroll-info plug-in that gives you more scrolling events and methods, and the ScrollView has undergone substantial changes with the addition of Forced-Axis, Dual-Axis, and Right-To-Left support.

You can download both the latest versions, as well as previous ones, from the YUI Download Center and the full list of changes is available in Github.