Build and use interactive blocks connected to the world of structured data

Blocks are individual pieces of content on the web – images, text, videos, checklists, and kanban boards are all examples of blocks.

You’ve seen these around the web. They’re used in almost every modern web application

You can’t easily move data from a to-do list on one website into a kanban board on another.

Unless you want to manually copy-paste it, or another developer has built the API integration for you.

These blocks use structured data which makes it easy to move both blocks themselves, and the data within blocks, even if the blocks are in completely separate applications.

Structured data is any data that maps to a schema

Schemas are standardized formats that define the possible properties of a thing, the expected types of those properties, and (sometimes) their expected values.

So the schema for a Person has the properties firstName, jobTitle, and email.

While the schema for an ItemList has the properties numberOfItems (a number) andListItems (an array of strings).

This standard format makes it easy for us to pass an ItemList between different kinds of blocks, no matter which application the blocks are embedded in.