You’ve probably seen web editors based on the idea of blocks . I’m typing this in WordPress, which has a little + button that brings up a long list of potential blocks that you can insert into this page:

This kind of “insert block” user interface concept is showing up in almost every blogging tool, web editor, note-taking app, and content management system. People like it and it makes sense.

We have seem to have standardized on one thing: the / key to insert a new block. Everything else, though, is completely proprietary and non-standard.

I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if blocks were interchangeable and reusable across the web?

Until now, every app that wants blocks has to implement them from scratch. Want a calendar block? Some kind of fancy Kanban board? Something to embed image galleries? Code it up yourself, buddy.

As a result of the non-standardization of blocks, our end-users suffer. If someone is using my blog engine, they can only use those blocks that I had time to implement.…