It's safe to say that every modern web application these days relies to some degree on three foundational web standards: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. While HTML has largely stabilized since the HTML5 standard, both CSS and JavaScript continue to evolve to meet developers' and users' needs.
The evolving nature of these three technologies has lead to the introduction of web components, a cross-browser solution for building complex web apps. On top of this open source standard, Salesforce developed Lightning Web Components (LWC) as a fast, enterprise-grade wrapper around vanilla web components. The result is a thin, performant, and feature-packed framework built entirely on the open web.