HTML5 Boilerplate - A rock-solid default template for HTML5 | Hacker News Reader

HTML5 Boilerplate - A rock-solid default template for HTML5

html5boilerplate.com

69 pointspaulirish19 comments

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The project went 1.0 today. Highlights:

* A custom builder to customize your download

* An Ant Build Script that handles all the optimization to make YSlow and PageSpeed happy.

* Rich documentation: http://html5boilerplate.com/docs

* Lots of videos (2 new) on Getting Started and familiarizing with the Build Script

* Default webserver configurations optimized for perf for: Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd, Google App Engine, IIS, NodeJS

* Many small tweaks (read the source comments and full changelog)

* A humans.txt

* All that and we even reduced the overall published size of the boilerplate.

Major thanks for html5boilerplate, for Modernizr, and especially for maintaining this page: https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/wiki/HTML5-Cross-brow... !

:) It deserves a better home, for sure. That'll come soon.

One of the best things about this (and other irish & co. projects)are the explanations and docs. This team always makes reading and understanding what's going on behind the scenes entertaining. It's immensely valuable to a relative newbie like myself.

For the Rails community, there's a compass framework for html5boilerplate: https://github.com/sporkd/compass-html5-boilerplate

It's not up to the v1.0 release, but it'll get you most of the way there.

It's up to date as of 3 weeks ago, so it's definitely reliable.

The build script is an awesome addition to an already great tool. Keep up the great work.

Yeah, that's a great addition, I'll have to start using it. I'm manually replacing the script tags in my code between deployment because I want to keep all the files separate for debugging and then minify after. It's a pain.

This looks neat, but being a DIY kind of dude, I'm not sure what this is for. I'm probably missing something--I think I know "what" it is, just not "why". Can anyone give me a brief rundown?

All of us involved in the project are pretty much "DIY" kind-of people :)

What we hope people do is to read through the source to see why we made the choices for defaults and pick and choose what they like and keep using them.

There are lots of defaults that were eye-opening to me that were suggested by the scores of contributors to the project.

Interesting. So if I understand correctly, the goal is largely to promote guidelines that improve compatibility and performance?

That is a goal yes, but these are the defaults that work for us, and we hope they work for everyone else (and we do look for suggestions to improve these), but if it does not work for you, we actively advocate choosing the defaults that do.

The reasons for each of the choices we made is all within the comments of the source file, so it is easier to choose what to keep and what to change.

Great! Thanks for the info.

I've been using & following the development of this boilerplate since its release & have only continued to be impressed. Thanks for making such a helpful & useful tool.

went to the website. got confused by the design. came back to yn to see what's other people like me are saying. they say the like it. going back to get second opinion...

I see it uses <head> and <body>, which, in fact, are not required. Pages without them pass W3C validation without warnings.

From a validation perspective you're totally right.

But browsers are supposed to create HEAD and BODY elements if your markup doesn't include them. However some do not: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/05/12/autohead-my-firs...

This means everyone's code that does `document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0]` will fail in some cases. Because that is rather risky, we decided to retain these optional elements..

The closing tags for </body> and </html> however...

Yes, but why are head and body not required? Just because a page validates without them does not make them superfluous in all cases.

A very cool starting point for anything going into a web browser. Thank you.

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