Polymer
More info
- Type
- JavaScript library
- Released
- 2013
- Owner
- License
- BSD-3
- Successor
- Lit
Google's library that willed Web Components into existence by pretending browsers already supported them.
Released in 2013 with a thesis directly opposed to React's: don't build your own component layer in JavaScript, standardise the platform instead and put a thin library on top. Polymer shipped polyfills for custom elements, shadow DOM, HTML imports and <template>, plus data binding and a component set (Paper Elements) in Material Design.
The strategy half worked. Custom elements and shadow DOM became standards and ship in every browser; HTML imports were rejected by Mozilla and Apple and died in favour of ES modules. Polymer 3 (2018) moved to npm, and in 2021 the team declared the project finished in favour of Lit — smaller, faster, same idea. AMP and several Google products, YouTube's front end among them, ran on Polymer for years.