Editor’s note: Mozilla has a long history of participating in standards development. The post below shows a real-time slice of how standards are debated and adopted. The goal is to update developers who are most affected by implementation decisions we make in Firefox. We are particularly interested in getting feedback from JavaScript library and framework developers.

Mozilla has been working on Web Components — a technology encompassing HTML imports, custom elements, and shadow DOM — for a while now and testing this approach in Gaia, the frontend of Firefox OS. Unfortunately, our feedback into the standards process has not always resulted in the changes required for us to ship Web Components. Therefore we decided to reevaluate our stance with members of the developer community.

We came up with the following tentative plan for shipping Web Components in Firefox and we would really appreciate input from the developer community as we move this forward. Web Components changes a core aspect of the Web Platform and getting it right is important. We believe the way to do that is by having the change be driven by the hard learned lessons from JavaScript library developers.

Mozilla will not ship an implementation of HTML Imports. We expect that once JavaScript modules — a feature derived from JavaScript libraries written by the developer community — is shipped, the way we look at this problem will have changed. We have also learned from Gaia and others, that lack of HTML Imports is not a problem as the functionality can easily be provided for with a polyfill if desired.

Mozilla will ship an implementation of custom elements. Exposing the lifecycle is a very important aspect for the creation of components. We will work with the standards community to use Symbol -named properties for the callbacks to prevent name collisions. We will also ensure the strategy surrounding subclassing is sound with the latest work on that front in JavaScript and that the callbacks are sufficiently capable to describe the lifecycle of elements or can at least be changed in that direction.

-named properties for the callbacks to prevent name collisions. We will also ensure the strategy surrounding subclassing is sound with the latest work on that front in JavaScript and that the callbacks are sufficiently capable to describe the lifecycle of elements or can at least be changed in that direction. Mozilla will ship an implementation of shadow DOM. We think work needs to be done to decouple style isolation from event retargeting to make event delegation possible in frameworks and we would like to ensure distribution is sufficiently extensible beyond Selectors. E.g Gaia would like to see this ability.

Our next steps will be working with the standards community to make these changes happen, making sure there is sufficient test coverage in web-platform-tests, and making sure the specifications become detailed enough to implement from.

So please let us know what you think here in the comments or directly on the public-webapps standards list!