You’ve probably heard all the noise about Web Components and how they’re going to change Web development forever. If you haven’t, you’ve either been living under a rock, are reading this article by accident, or have a full, busy life that doesn’t leave you time to read about unstable and speculative Web technologies. Well, not me.

Web Components are going to fundamentally change the nature of HTML. At first glance, they may seem like a complicated set of new technologies, but Web Components are built around a simple premise. Developers should be free to act like browser vendors, extending the vocabulary of HTML itself.

The web severely lacks expression. To see what I mean, take a peek at a "modern" web app like GMail. Modern web apps: built with <div> soup. There's nothing modern about <div> soup. And yet, this is how we build web apps. It's sad. Shouldn't we demand more from our platform?

Web Components, including Shadow DOM, are accessible because assistive technologies encounter pages as rendered, meaning the entire document is read as "one happy tree". With a polyfill to add broader support, users with modern browsers can interact with Web Components using a keyboard, touch or mouse. Screen readers will also read the page aloud, illustrating how Shadow DOM fits seamlessly into the regular DOM.

It’s easy: to make Web Components accessible to all users, write accessible code.

Web Components have come a long way in the past few months and one of the technologies that I’m most interested in is HTML Imports (or “imports”, for short). Imports allow you to load additional documents into your page without having to write a bunch of Ajax. This is great for Custom Elements where you might want to import a suite of new tags. I spent the day playing with imports and thought it would be useful to write up my progress.

Let's face it. There's nothing sexy about unstyled markup. Lucky for us, the brilliant folks behind Web Components foresaw this and didn't leave us hanging. We have many options when it comes to styling content in a shadow tree.