Based on my understanding of the Polymer strategy, I wonder if any name 
that speaks to directly to web components will prove too limiting in the 
future.

On a separate 
thread<https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/polymer-dev/7UT-mCiHAVM/P1t9adywlgQJ>,
 
I presented the view that the current polyfill strategy is suitable for 
much more than web components, and could (and should) be adopted for future 
specs. The fact that, for example, Pointer Events and Web Animations are 
grouped under the "web components" umbrella seems more a historical 
accident than intention. In the case of Pointer Events, that shipped 
independently in IE, and both of those technologies could be used in a page 
that has no component nature at all. I hear Google referring to these as 
web component technologies, when to me they're just new web technologies.

The same thing will surely happen going forward. The next time someone 
proposes a new, polyfillable spec for a feature that has nothing to do with 
components. Having to create a new polyfill library just for that one spec 
seems overly complex. Won't the most natural thing to do be to include that 
in platform.js? If that library is renamed webcomponents.js, it seems 
likely that name will eventually become increasingly inappropriate. (Cf. 
jQuery)

My two cents: Polymer is a great name. It's catchy, memorable, and has an 
etymology that can be explained. If it were up to me, I'd rename 
platform.js to polymer.js. Polymer would be the "brand" by which the world 
refers to a vendor-independent browser compatibility library.

Otherwise, I'd recommend selecting a name that suggests the *role* the 
polyfill library fills: standards.js, or compat.js.

The thing I'd rename is actually polymer.html. In my understanding, 
polymer.html has a more focused responsibility: support the creation of 
custom elements. That role seems unlikely to evolve much over time. If 
that's correct, then a descriptive name like customelements.html would be 
attractive. (Of course, I could easily be misunderstanding the boundary 
between platform.js and polymer.html. Please correct me if I'm wrong!)

On Friday, January 31, 2014 4:20:12 AM UTC-8, Addy Osmani wrote:
>
> Whilst I like platform.js, webcomponents.js makes the literal distinction 
> between Polymer and the polyfills all the more clear. 
>
> Hope that rename happens :)
>
> On Thursday, 30 January 2014 20:53:10 UTC, Steve Orvell wrote:
>>
>> +1
>>
>> We've been consdering re-naming platform to webcomponents as well.
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 12:50 PM, John Messerly <[email protected]>wrote:
>>
>>> Hello polymerites,
>>>
>>> I'm going to create a Pub (http://pub.dartlang.org/) package for 
>>> polymer's platform.js, to replace our individual polyfill pkgs: shadow_dom, 
>>> html_imports, and custom_elements. The individual pkgs have been a bit of a 
>>> headache as they get out of sync, etc. Plus it would be awesome to reuse 
>>> exactly the same JS code from the corresponding Bower[1] package. Since 
>>> "platform" is a really generic name, I was thinking of calling this package 
>>> "web_components". Any objections?
>>>
>>> Note: template_binding and observe would stay separate pkgs on Pub, so 
>>> they wouldn't be included conceptually.
>>>
>>> Cheers!
>>> - John
>>>
>>>
>>>  [1]: leaving aside for now the question of Pub interoping directly with 
>>> Bower. That's a good long term solution but will take a while to get there.
>>>
>>>  Follow Polymer on Google+: plus.google.com/107187849809354688692
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>>
>>

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