What is concord?

Concord is a specification for making software modules, self-contained pieces of code and assets, that work across different build systems and environments without requiring special setup. The core idea is that a module author should be able to publish a package containing JavaScript, stylesheets, images, templates, and other files, and any application can use it without manual configuration. The key innovation is a separation of concerns: modules declare what types of files they contain (like "stylesheet/less" or "url/image"), while the application decides how to process them (inline images as data, bundle CSS separately, etc.). This means a module works out of the box with sensible defaults, but the app retains full control over optimization and output format. Modules can also use conditional configuration, serving different files for web vs. server environments, or enabling lazy-loading only when the build system supports it. A developer building a UI component library would use concord to package their JavaScript alongside Less stylesheets, HTML templates, and image assets. Someone building a web app could pull in that library and automatically get the right behavior, stylesheets applied to the page, images loaded on demand, without adding loader configuration or running preprocessing steps. The same library could also work in a Node.js server environment, with irrelevant assets automatically excluded. The specification is notably agnostic: it reuses existing package managers like npm rather than being one itself, and it supports custom module types so the system can grow beyond the predefined categories. It compares itself to browserify, component, and webpack 1.x, identifying how each forces module authors, application authors, or build systems to shoulder configuration burdens that concord aims to eliminate. The project is marked as a work in progress, so the specification may still be evolving.