The developer community is doing work right now that is being used to write new W3C standards for web components. Think of encapsulation or OOP. Google’s approach is Polymer, a library which provides a “sugaring layer” of features. Polymer is built on top of platform.js, which extends the functionality of your browser to include next-gen features required to run web components. Some of the new features involved include building modular elements inside of HTML Templates, support to write your own unique Custom Elements with custom named tags (eg. could be functioning html), the Shadow DOM which protects styles from bleeding over, and Model Driven Views (front end to back end data binding). Google’s Platform.js is also being used by Mozilla X-Tags.

It is important to note that Polymer is forward facing only and does not attempt to conform to any sort of backwards compatibility; only the last two versions of any given browser are supported and there is no intention to appeal to previous standards. Polymer is not a programming language, it’s just an opinionated library. The core polymer team are also key contributors to W3C’s evolving standards for web components. Work being done now is for tomorrow’s standard, so we can get a fresh perspective on how the web should work instead of simply conforming to legacy approaches.

The talk will include basic instructions for getting started with Polymer using NPM and Bower. We will discuss the role of web components in future standards. There will be a general outline of how Polymer and it’s dependencies fits into the stack and what job each part of the stack preforms.

We will go over how to make custom elements so you can get started actually having fun with Polymer.