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Espruino is a JavaScript interpreter for low-power Microcontrollers. This site is both a support community for Espruino and a place to share what you are working on.
@allObjects
Looked into Polymer a while ago... and it is the logical continuation of extensible SGML. Since in the end it is HTML and CSS (and JavaScript) that a browser has to understand, getting the right HTML and CSS (and helping Javascript) in will get you to any place. At the time I had to go production, about 2007 and no HTML5 - the available framework and toolkit supporting such things was dojotoolkit.org. jQuery was already around as well but followed quite a different approach...
With dojo - the widgets are dijit widgets - start in the code as plain divs or inputs or... you name it, and have the html extensible property data-dojo-... in them. After loading the page - or with single page applicaitons, afer loading a new 'basic' html piece with 'dojo/dijit ingredients' - a one-time-parse goes through the dom (or dom branch) and 'converts' the dom to what it has to be to show the desired look. (Nice description of the lifecycle of a/any dijit widget.
At the time when dojo came up, crossbrowser compatibility - and other browser deficiencies in regard of dom manuplations, such as memory leaks - was/were still a great deal, and dojo was a greate choice to have that hidden from the application code. Developing a - templated - widget is easy: a mock html fragment is used as string for the template, and where things have to be variable, templating techniques are use to contextualize that and additional attributes called attachepoints can be added to make the dom nodes of interest as easy accessible as properties of a view-model, with all the benefits of synchronization/eventing if so is desired. Since initiation, other techniques have been added, beause templating is not the most fastest, though a very easy to understand and fast to develop.
Polymer goes much further and aliminates a lot of internal plumbing (and restrictions, and also the shadow dom), and it pulls the viewmodel and view tighter together to a seamless single thing: Web component. I'm glad it has just been released as version 1.0. On top of this matured infrastructure it should not be that hard to add designer-looks vs. geek-frugalities. For sure, what ever has been done, is not just smoke and mirrors, but solid OO and M*VC implementations... and it obviusly works across browsers too.