Mental Model

MLForm has one job: keep form UI, validation state, submitted payloads, and model reports consistent.

Concept	Role
Schema	Describes fields, reports, labels, validation limits, and conditional behavior.
Engine	Owns normalized ids, current values, field state, report state, validation, and submit state.
Transport	Sends serialized values to a backend or local model.
Primitives	Render engine descriptors as Web Components.
Design system	Resolves themes, recipes, density, motion, and CSS tokens.
Mounted handle	Owns cleanup, design updates, and access to the underlying form controller.

Most applications should start at the kit layer:

import { mountForm } from "mlform/kit";

Use the engine directly when you want headless state without the built-in UI. Use primitives directly when you want MLForm’s Web Components but your own application shell.