When it comes to newer elements to play with there are a few that are slightly odd. Canvas is one of them, as it doesn’t do anything without scripting. It is a placeholder for a canvas painting or animation and can contain fallback content when it is not supported. Template is another such element that needs to be addressed in this way.

Web Components are awesome for building web apps out of interoperable widgets. They’re made out of 4 technologies which Polymer 1.0 brings to all major web browsers using polyfills. However one of them, HTML Imports, is so problematic that Mozilla refuses to implement it natively. Let’s work around it using SystemJS and discover a whole new and (in my opinion) nicer way of working with Polymer!

Building a realtime collaborative to-do application, where task status is synced in realtime across all connected devices as their state is changed can be a difficult thing to manage. Using Polymer an PubNub to build a collaborative application enables users to receive updates between connected devices, and to sync state.

Three years ago, there was a lot of excitement surrounding Web Components: everybody talked about them, the frameworks Ember and Angular planned to integrate them or even be based on them, etc.

By now, that excitement seems to have died down. This blog post examines what happened to Web Components. Spoiler: they are alive and well and slowly being adopted across browsers.

In the front-end world, testing is a weird topic. Developers know how much testing is important, but lots of them don’t embrace this practice. This is because testing is often perceived as a time consuming and a difficult task.

There has been revived interest in standardizing shadow DOM and custom elements across all browsers. To that end we had a bunch of discussion online, met in April to discuss shadow DOM, and met earlier this month to discuss custom elements. There is agreement around shadow DOM now. host.attachShadow() will give you a ShadowRoot instance. And <slot> elements can be used to populate the shadow tree with children from the host.