By now, you may have heard a lot of things about Web Components. Some people say it's the promise land, others say it has been oversold.

Although they're not going to solve all your life's problems, they do provide a paradigm shift from the traditional approach of web development.

If you still aren't sure about what exactly is Web Components or even why you should care about it, this article is for you.

While evolving the “Developer Preview” of Polymer, we made the tough decision to do a significant internal redesign. This move enabled us to move away from experimentation towards production-readiness, and is a big step towards a 1.0.

Considerations for web component and custom control design:

If your control has the stuff below covered, excellent! If not then please implement it before shouting to the world about it being the next big thing. Or at least document its deficits and provide a health warning that the control is incomplete and not fit to use in production.

With the rising popularity of web components and supporting libraries like Polymer, custom elements become an attractive way to build UI features. The default encapsulation of custom elements makes them especially useful for creating independent widgets.

While some of the widgets are self-contained, many of them rely on external data to present the content to the user - e.g., the current forecast for a weather widget or the address of a company for a map widget.

It would be great if we could avoid repetition and ensure data consistency, by reusing the same data snippets to populate different widgets as well as inform search engines and other consumers about the content of our page. We can achieve this by using the schema.org standard and the JSON-LD format for our data.

Gosh, what a snappy title. I’m not expecting a job offer from Buzzfeed any time soon.

Today, Apple sent their consolidated feedback on Web Components to the webapps Working Group. The TL;DR: they like the concept, are “considering significant implementation effort”, but want lots of changes first including removal of subclassing, eg <button is=”my-button”>.

If we could list a Top 10 Web Components' Early Adopters, this guy would definitely be one of them. He's the founder of Divshot, a company that helps developers build better static web apps, and created several tools that you might heard already.

Ladies and gentlemen, let's continue our interview series with Michael Bleigh sharing his motivations behind Web Components.