HTML5 Boilerplate hits 2.0

Every website is different, but most start with a similar foundation of basic files. HTML5 Boilerplate is one of several projects that aims to more rapidly kickstart a project and also, according to its creators, "pools the cumulative knowledge and best practices of many web developers, so that everyone can avoid making poor development decisions".

Primarily driven by Divya Manian, Paul Irish, Shichuan, Nicolas Gallagher and Mathias Bynens, who provided their thoughts to .net in collective hive-mind fashion, HTML5 Boilerplate has now reached its 2.0 milestone. "1.0 was released in March 2011 and we had many big fixes and additional features we wanted to add — between 1.0 and 2.0, we've committed over 250 changes," they said. "We were also emphatic about making sure H5BP delivers the best performance for all your projects, and the build script is primarily work to that effect."

According to the team, a major change has been "dropping the traditional 'bulldozer' reset in favour of targeted CSS normalisation," which benefits designers due to "the retention of useful browser defaults, a more consistent default experience, bug fixes for desktop and mobile browsers, and better documentation of the CSS code". Elsewhere, the latest release includes a custom build of Modernizr 2.0 that features Yepnope ("load your resources conditionally") and Respond.js ("to enable legacy browsers to support min/max-width media queries, helping H5BP be a good starting point for 'mobile first' development"). Additionally, the 2.0 release has the Chrome Frame prompt on by default for IE6 and offers significant build script improvements.

For the future, the team says there are always bug fixes to do and improvements to be made, and that "standards hardly stay the same, and so HTML5 Boilerplate will head wherever the open web heads to next".