Every new web technology should improve either user or developer experience, or ideally both. But even if the technologies do both of these things, finding and stitching together the right tech to use -- let alone libraries, especially in the colossal thicket of modern JavaScript libraries -- can be a chore.

Last week KendoUI officially leaped to the rescue, offering to simplify UI development across platforms.

Plenty of widgets are available right out of the box, including extensive data visualization, using SVG with VML fallback.

KendoUI's promises run alongside HTML5's run-once-run-anywhere ambitions, but also directly address one of the major concerns of HTML5 skeptics: performance.

For UI in particular, performance is crucially important: for an interface to feel natural, just a milliseconds can make a huge difference. KendoUI accordingly claims high performance across their whole toolkit, taking advantage of e.g. CSS3 hardware acceleration for animations.

Frankly, the real reason I'm writing about this is because I'm super-impressed by the demos' performance. (The API's look very simple too, but I haven't built anything with them yet.) Assuming they work reliably, their speed means that they should prove extremely useful for many web applications.

Check out the website, along with the blog (full of useful announcements the beta process). Or view the launch webinar (also embedded below), which is quite long (73 minutes) and a little drawn-out (especially toward the beginning), but captures some of the energy the project seems to be radiating.