681 lines? The HTML5 Boilerplate that I grabbed from Paul Irish's website, the commented version, is 94 lines. And much of the stuff can be removed. I have my own HTML5 boilerplate as a TextMate snippet, but augment it.

One thing about the Paul Irish boilerplate: why is the doctype declaration in lowercase?

<!doctype html> as opposed to <!DOCTYPE html>. TextMate doesn't seem to like the lowercase doctype as it highlights it in red. Not sure about Vim or Emacs.