When browsing through web sites and online applications, there are hundreds of widgets that come across your screen. Each button in your web browser is a widget. Each text entry box is a widget. We all know what a limited set of widgets that standard HTML provides: an input box, a button, a hyperlink.

Dojo widgets take an item like a text input box and adds functionality of a more user friendly object, like a graphical calendar to choose a date from. And it does this without breaking the original item on which the new functionality is built on.