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About Chapeaux

The philosophy and history behind the Chapeaux Project

A Digital Supply Chain for Web Assets

Chapeaux began as an effort to craft functional (meaning no user interface) web components helping teams with small or no dedicated frontend teams implement shared functionality across sites. The Project expanded as more needs arose in the enterprise. Developers and stakeholders have to juggle diverse requirements, frameworks, and standards; the Chapeaux Project aims to simplify things by providing a cohesive ecosystem of tools and assets that work across the enterprise — regardless of the technology stack.

The Three Ds

The project is organized around three primary stages:

Develop

Create enterprise-grade, functional web assets and development tools that are secure, scalable, and stable. The components and tools are designed to be UI-neutral and dependency-free when possible — focusing on functionality over visual style. This means they can be used in any design system or framework context, and consumed in a diversity of ways (no runtime-specific ecosystem necessary).

Current web components use the cpx-* naming convention and include tools for search, user management, content delivery, data layers, and more. The tools don't follow a specific naming convention, but are often named after some type of headwear.

Discover

A central catalog to find, explore, and understand available web assets and development tools across the enterprise. The Discover stage aims to improve the findability of common assets, provide demos and documentation, and build a curated list with useful metadata and analytics.

The catalog leverages semantic web technologies including RDF, SPARQL, and Oxigraph to enable rich, queryable metadata about available assets.

Deliver

Standardize enterprise-wide web asset delivery. The goal is to expand beyond the NodeJS/NPM ecosystem, allow flexible packaging and bundling, and provide an "a la carte" consumption model where teams choose what they need.

Design Principles

  • Unopinionated — Chapeaux does not prescribe visual style, design systems, or framework choices
  • Enterprise-grade — Security, scalability, and stability are non-negotiable
  • Framework agnostic — Tools work with React, Angular, Vue, vanilla JS, or any other approach
  • Modular — Use one component or use them all — there's no forced dependency chain
  • Standards-based — Built on web standards and open specifications
  • Open source — Transparent development with community governance

The Name

"Chapeaux" is French for "hats" — a nod to the many hats that web developers wear. Whether you're building components, managing a design system, setting up a delivery pipeline, or exploring what's available across your organization, Chapeaux provides tools to help.