Web Components have become a bit of a divisive topic in the Web community in recent years. On the one hand you have platform advocates arguing Web Components are a boon to interoperability, can simplify tooling and distribution, and provide a common bed for experimentation and innovation. On the other hand, framework authors often complain that they complicate runtime code with special-cases and that Custom Elements are the wrong level of abstraction for framework components.

Lustre 1 - a frontend framework for the functional programming language Gleam [2] - is bucking this trend; quietly using Web Components as a core building block of its runtime. In this talk we'll explore how Lustre can lean harder into the platform by adopting a different idea of what "components" should be, and how this can end up benefit framework users too.

[2] https://gleam.run