Component Kitchen preview launched

Today we’re excited to publicly announce the launch of a preview edition of our site at https://component.kitchen.

At Component Kitchen, we think web components are fundamentally a great way to create apps and sites that run across an enormous range of desktop and mobile devices. We’re eager to help a mainstream audience learn about this technology, and discover for themselves how this technology is going to amplify their own creative capabilities as designers, developers, writers, students, business people, and more.

Earlier this year, we observed that most of the material and tools related to web components was intended for a fairly experienced technical audience. We feel that, since web components extend what’s possible with plain HTML and CSS, web components is actually fundamentally interesting to a much broader audience: anyone who is comfortable editing HTML. That’s a lot of people!

Additionally, we believe that people creating web components are going to need a range of services to help promote and distribute their components to a broad audience that includes both hardcore developers and people who work at the HTML level.

We’re starting with a few basics:

• A catalog of components which have publicly registered for use. The preview release is quite basic, but includes some interesting features such as image previews for many components, and an ability to search the catalog.
• A New Web Components RSS feed. Subscribe to learn about new components as soon as they’re registered.
• A discussion board for talking about web components. There are some other public forums for web components, but they focus on a highly technical audience. Lots of people will want to use components who have never heard of developer hangouts like GitHub or StackOverflow.

We have a number of interesting features ahead:

• Live, interactive, configurable component demos. You can see an example on the page for the basic-autosize-textarea component. This lets you play with the component and see how its customization options will affect its appearance and behavior.
• Web component hosting. Many people create HTML in environments like blogging platforms or mainstream web hosting platforms that don’t allow complete control over the site. If that’s you, we want to allow you to still take advantage of web components by hosting the components on Component Kitchen. Again, visit the basic-autosize-textarea component for an example of component hosting. Click the Copy to Clipboard button, then paste the result in any HTML editor or environment. This will paste in the <script> and <link> tags that let you use that component from its hosted location on Component Kitchen.

Our core mission is to help people create great products using web components. While we have many ideas for how we can do that, we’re most interested in hearing from you. If you have questions or suggestions for our site, let us know at @ComponentK on Twitter, or on our discussion board.

This is going to be such an exciting time to work on the web!