Web Components: Rethinking Web App Development

Web Components is an emerging umbrella of standards that fundamentally changes the way we compose our web applications. Web Components abstract away the complexity introduced when using low-level building blocks such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This complexity is usually handled on the level of web frameworks, where we can perceive few phenomenons: web frameworks usually it’s own way of how to work with low-level APIs, maintains custom UI widget suites, lock us in a particular solution. What about inventing some common denominator that could frameworks and app developers built upon? Web Components are essentially a set of improvements that are being added to the web platform: HTML Imports, Shadow DOM, <template>, custom elements, decorators. All of these APIs are on their way to becoming standards. But can we leverage them already? Thanks to polyfill libraries like Polymer we can leverage those new APIs right away! Thanks to Web Components, the web will get a new common denominator which kills fragmentation and encourages reuse and portability of user interfaces.