Mozilla Gets On The Web Components Bandwagon With Brick

Web Components will change how you build web apps in the near future. At its core, web components let developers create reusable custom HTML tags (think: <datepicker>) for user interface patterns. Building them isn’t trivial, but all it takes is some knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript to get going (though knowing something about what “Shadow DOM” is all about surely helps, too). The Web Components standardization process is still far from finished, but that isn’t stopping Google and Mozilla from putting their efforts behind it.

The problem, of course, is how can you start working with Web Components if most browsers don’t support it yet? That’s where the polyfill concept comes in, as well as Google’s Polymer framework and Mozilla’s less imaginatively named x-Tag polyfill library. The polyfill concept has been around for a while. The idea here is to replicate an API that the browser should have natively in JavaScript or a similar language to ensure that a new technology works across browsers, even if it’s not implemented natively yet (that’s essentially the same concept Modernizr uses, too). Both Google’s and Mozilla’s projects share the same low-level Web Components polyfills.