Paul Irish on HTML5 Boilerplate

I've used Paul Irish's boilerplate and I can attest that even if you decide not to adopt it outright, you can learn a lot just by reading through it.

HTML5 is one of those ever-changing technologies where what was once considered common-practice is now considered deprecated. I think this is often the case with a fast-moving, widely distributed technology. Paul does a great job of collecting a lot of wisdom and maintains it in an easy to understand format. It also does backwards compatibility right. Helped me out a lot.

Edit: Also he's a really nice guy. :-)

Some notes from his talk:

* <!doctype html>

* The web server can serve certain meta tags (e.g. in .htaccess for apache) which would not have validated. (e.g. X-UA-Compatible to specify content)

* <meta charset="utf-8" /> is acceptible in most browswers

* // instead of http:// makes a relative URL, works in most if not all browsers

* html { overflow-y: scroll; } fixes contents moving due to scrollbar appearance on longer pages

* DD_belatedPNG - better IE PNG fix http://www.dillerdesign.com/experiment/DD_belatedPNG/

* Often a good idea to use font-family "sans-serif" instead of "Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" for better cross-platform sans-serif font choice

I love the idea of being able to do a git merge html5-bilerplate html5bp-test-upgrade into one my projects and pickup the latest best practices to review. In practice I've never done that and I hand pick the parts I want.

Paul Irish's projects (and his cohorts) do a really good job of exposing the current state of web technologies. The Modernizr docs for example talks about how many JS and html5 apis are supported differently and what you can do about it.

http://www.modernizr.com/docs/

Himself and the yayQuery team are a large part of why I love Javascript.

It's rare to see such a funny tech presenter. Nice job!