I really like/appreciate/admire the Yahoo! Developer Network for what they're putting out. I don't have much use for most of Yahoo!'s other services (Flickr excluded); but most everything to come out of their Developer Network is pretty damn nifty. The YUI JS libraries are pretty brilliant (esp. the WYSIWYG editor) and this "design stencil" is just inspired - it's the kind of initiative webapps in general need to make them even more viable alternatives to desktop applications. (As a desktop developer myself, I say that with a huge twinge of sadness; but it's true nevertheless).

If Yahoo! were to be gobbled-up, Flickr and the Yahoo! Developer Network would be the only things I'd pray aren't canceled.

Agreed. Google is playing catch-up bigtime with their "web developer community initiatives" or whatever they call them, but it all seems too little, too late, in comparison with Yahoo! DN...

Yahoo is beginning to treat the whole Internet like an operating system...in the sense that there are Windows UI guidelines, Mac OS UI guidelines, Gnome UI guidelines, etc. If everybody were to standardize on the important stuff, usability of the web in general would go way up. Much the same way going from DOS to Windows (or Mac OS) made it possible for a very large number of applications to share common conventions, making them all easier to use.

I don't know how strong the business case for this is for Yahoo's bottom line, but it does seem like it's cheaper to define the standards rather than play catch-up on converting two or three years down the road when everyone settles on a set of conventions. It's also good to be a thought leader among developers and designers...frankly, I feel more warm-fuzzies for Yahoo these days than Google, primarily because Yahoo has done so much for improving web design and making UI development on the web really nice and predictable. They've begun to turn it from a black art into an engineering discipline (vision and taste still matter, but a lot of the usability problems have been formalized into a coherent system rather than a pile of guesses).

I can't see the uses for such a limited stencil set though. Am I missing something?

Agreed. Cool concept, but I can't imagine much actual use coming from them.

It's also extremely uncreative and lazy.

Tried downloading SVG zip... shows page not found...

I just downloaded the SVG. Worked fine for me. They must have fixed it.