Briefly, this works very nicely when $Y$ is locally compact, but not otherwise. Then the function space carries the compact-open topology. John Isbell gave a survey of the story and literature in his paper <i>General Function Spaces, Products and Continuous Lattices</i>, in Math Proc Cam Phil Soc <b>100</b> (1986) 193--205. It is an ongoing matter in theoretical computer science.