The folks over at the Yahoo! design department have just posted a library of AJAX and other User Interface tools that web designers can use in their own sites.  See, for example, the generic slider example that allows site visitors to move a graphic display between points on a continuum.  I really like sliders.  Other offerings include a calendar and a TreeView system for expanding and contracting nodes in a tree form display of any set of data.

The library was launched in conjunction with a blog to support it, very nice.  It's good to see a public facing web services company embrace the "the more you give, the more you get" type of open source model.

Too bad other departments in the company are accused of continuing to helping send users to prison.  I'd say that practice takes a little wind out of the sails of statements about the UI Library like - "Yahoo! keeps showing the world how much they get web 2.0."  (WeBreakThings) That may be true of the AJAX/Open Source part of Web 2.0, but it doesn't look good for the "democratizing impact of user generated content" part of the new paradigm.

Good for Yahoo on the library though.  I'll be excited to see if these features start popping up in unexpected places.