Mobile Boilerplate: a best practice baseline for your mobile Web app | Hacker News Reader

Mobile Boilerplate: a best practice baseline for your mobile Web app

html5boilerplate.com

159 pointsthankuz22 comments

Wonderful! The HTML5 Boilerplate contained lots of little gems from different front-end devs. If this is just half as good, I'll be really happy.

Paul Irish is really making front-end development exciting.

Shi Chuan, an excellent frontend dev from Singapore joined our development team last fall and spearheaded the Mobile Boilerplate. I'm just very happy we have a smart avenue to distribute best practices-- mobile is a really hairy area.

Yeah, this was mostly Shi Chuan's effort, and he wrote a few blog posts along the way too http://www.blog.highub.com/mobile-2/the-complete-idiots-guid... and http://www.blog.highub.com/mobile-2/revisit-hardboiled-css3-...

I am bit reticent in using the .htaccess in this package; how would you go about still offering the option to visit the standard website? This seems to directly redirect all mobile user agents to the mobile variant.

Right now that UA sniff to mobile redirect is a little undercommented. We'll address this.

We just wanted to highlight one of the most robust detection sniffs available. It is left commented out by default. And it's up to you in case you want to hijack your mobile users to toss them to your mobile site. (And yes I agree we should allow them to go back)

I've filed this ticket so we can do a better job of explaining this code's presence: https://github.com/shichuan/mobile-html5-boilerplate/issues/...

the boilerplate is always delete/add friendly, as Paul mentioned, we will hear more voices. thanks for bringing this up :)

This looks great! I'm assuming you could then plug-in jQuery Mobile to take advantage of the UI widgets for a very nice mobile-optimized website. Then use something like PhoneGap to bundle it as a native app (if needed).

Yup! That sounds ideal.

The site says it works well with Sencha Touch. What would you gain there? It seems many of these features are built in to Sencha Touch and it's limited to iOS, Android and Blackberry 6, anyway.

Are you suggesting using Boilerplate as a complement where Sencha Touch doesn't work? I can see how this might work well. Any suggestions on how one might take this route?

Perhaps you could build around Boilerplate and conditionally include the js/css for Sencha on iOS, Android and Blackberry 6.

I love you guys and the whole Boilerplate projects. Amazing work; really helps me learn best practices!

From https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/html5boilerplate/dNb...:

> This is the first time I've heard of Mobile Boilerplate. Can you provide > some background info? Specifically I am wondering, why desktop/mobile are > separate rather than combined into one download? What is the suggested > implementation of a site with both desktop & mobile versions?

HTML5Boilerplate is the one you should use if you are getting started on websites. It is optimized to work and adapt on mobile browsers.

Mobile HTML5 Boilerplate is optimized for web apps that are explicitly written to have different UX while on devices other than the desktop. * This means they might want to imitate the UI of native applications or be close to it. * They may make heavy use of touch-based UI paradigms and other interactions that are not possible on a desktop browser. * They explictly use media queries and other ways to detect a non-desktop browser and serve an experience that is different.

When I say web apps, I mean websites that are used intensively to accomplish certain tasks (like twitter.com / gmail.com / facebook.com / admin interface of wordpress.com ). These sites are required to take advantage of the space available and help users accomplish their tasks with minimal effort no matter what device.

On the other hand, we do have websites that users visit occasionally because they found it on some friend's email or on reddit which has content but users rarely interact with it (other than just visiting it or at most leaving a comment), in which case html5 boilerplate would be a good template to use. This would be a good option for most sites that are content-rich and require minimal user interaction.

Unfortunately for us, mobile platforms are also creating silos by specifying custom meta tags to use to optimize for their platform. E.g. Apple recommends using apple-touch-icon meta tag to specify things specific to webkit mobile browsers. Nokia has its own. We did not want html5boilerplate to add such cruft to the defaults, but this would be necessary for someone writing an application tailored to take advantage of non-desktop devices. There is already a lot of consistency, but we wish there was more standardization of mobile optimizations.

Please do contribute suggestions for improving the mobile boilerplate here: https://github.com/shichuan/mobile-html5-boilerplate/issues

Wonder how long for "The real HTML5 boilerplate" to arrive. http://csswizardry.com/2011/01/the-real-html5-boilerplate/

His real html5 boilerplate isn't very useful. it's basically doctype html5 and css reset. It seems to me he's complaining that http://html5boilerplate.com/ doesn't have a better builder UI.

Maybe his blog post is old? checkout http://initializr.com/

I'm inclined to agree with this: "A boilerplate should be added to, not subtracted from".

I don't use "the" HTML5 boilerplate for that reason. At best I'll fork it, subtract all the extra crap, and use my fork.

It is useful when you're just knocking something quick together as an experiment and you have no intention of ever deploying it in any serious way. The full boilerplate is overkill and actually creates more work for you in that scenario.

Initializr was integrated into H5BP and launched last week. :) See the Boilerplate Custom button on http://h5bp.com

It seems the biggest problem is that the boilerplate seems to act more like a framework instead of just a library. If that's the case, then using this with other frameworks like Sproutcore and Cappuccino can prove quite daunting...

one of the thing about h5bp/mbp is that it gets your project off the ground quickly and right-footed

if you are using other frameworks and feel hard to implement everything in, this can at least be used as reference or inspiration.

Useful for me. I learned a lot picking through it. Watch Paul's talk if you have the time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyM37XKkmKQ

Here to emphasize how thoroughly enjoyable and useful this is. Eye-opening, if you will.

It's a must-watch for front-end designers and developers.

Awesome. These boilerplates are very useful. Good work, Paul and team (as always)

Just a friendly heads-up that there are typos I noticed on the "Intro to MBP" slides: (4) we leave e ass 4 u to kick (6) makrup

An HTML5 Game Boilerplate is the only stone left unturned (hint hint).

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