ALL YUI 3 code on a page is placed in its own sandbox. This allows several parts of a page to be completely independent, with benefits in maintainability and stability: one sandbox cannot have any effect on another sandbox on the page, and a sandbox only uses the modules it needs. These sandboxes are create with YUI.use :

If you have a function based on YUI that you are going to reuse often, as I had with transitioning MyOwnDB to YUI 3, the best solution is to define it in a module that you'll use in each sandbox that needs it. Defining a module is done with YUI.add which also lets you specify which other modules it depends on. The body of the module is simply adding a namespage to YUI, which will hold all my code, defining the function and putting it under the namespace just created, like this:

Now I can simply use my new module and its associated function in any sandbox I define:

Thanks to Satake and Daniel Cook on the YUI Forum for their advice .

As I'm working on the new interface of MyOwnDB based on YUI, I have discovered 2 subtle differences between IE and FF when creating nodes with YUI 3.

1. You can't change attribute values of INPUT nodes created from a template using the long closing node syntax

Update: IE is actually doing the right thing, as the input tag does not accept a closing tag as defined by the W3C .

By long syntax, I mean closing a tag with an explicit closing tag:

as opposed to the short syntax:

If you create an input node with YUI3 based on the long syntax with IE, you won't be able to set attribute values:

The solution is to use the short syntax to close your tag:

Note that this is only for input nodes. Divs are workling fine with the long syntax:

2. With IE, you can't set the type of an input node to "file"

This code will generate a file field with FF, but a text field with IE:

If you want to make it work with IE, you have to make your template include the type attribute:

I've put a demo page for those interesting in the code, with a YUI console.

YUI2's Datatable is a great widget I use in MyOwnDB and here's a small tip for when you use it to load a remote data source .

In that case, the datatable is getting the data to display from a YUI2 DataSource that has been configured with the URL to use when fetching the data requested by the datatable.

When instanciating the datatable, you can pass it a configuration object, with amongst other option, the initialRequest that should be sent by the associated datasource when the datatable is displayed for the first time. initialRequest is a string that is simply appended to the URL passed to the DataSource.

So if your datasource URL is "http://www.myurl.com?all=true", and your initialRequest is "sort=name", the request sent by the DataSource will be for the URL "http://www.myurl.com?all=truesort=name", which is clearly not good.

The solution here is to either be sure that the datasource URL ends with a ? or a &, or to always start the initialRequest with &.

The second option is the easiest in my case.