The Yahoo! Developer Network has recently surfaced building blocks of this language. At the lowest level, JSON has spread throughout the public Yahoo! APIs as a sort of language of discourse for web applications. And fast on its heels, the Yahoo! User Interface Library (an AJAX framework), has just been released to the open source community. This is essentially a language of commerce for developing web applications.

But at the highest level--at the point of user engagement and attention--a language of interaction has been opened to the community: the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. Its goal is to share a vocabulary around designing for engagement. It informs the newest areas of design within Yahoo! and provides a home for sharing the best design and code solutions with the community at large.

Drawing on his AJAX evangelism experience with teams throughout Yahoo!, Scott demonstrates how these offerings are informing the latest advances in the Yahoo! attempt to garner user attention.