Html5Boilerplate or Html5Boilerplate Mobile for mobile-first website?

Question

Now that Html5Boilerplate has reached version 2.0 and is oriented around mobile-first design, should Html5Boilerplate Mobile still be used for mobile-first sites? Just wanted to ask b/f I dig through the code of each.

It appears one of the obvious differences is that Html5Boilerplate has switched from CSS reset to normalize, and added mobile-first aspects like respond.js and mobile media query sections. Standard boilerplate appears more active on Github as well. Anyone have any opinion about these two?

Answer 1

No, Html5Boilerplate Mobile should not be used for new projects; it is deprecated.

A deprecation notice was added in July 2015 to the project's GitHub repo (as of this answering -- Aug 2016 -- that was the most recent commit):

The H5BP team decided to no longer maintain Mobile Boilerplate since HTML5 Boilerplate seems to be a good starting point for any kind of project.

Answer 2

Stealing this answer mostly from our mailing list thread on the subject...

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.

We are planning an update to the mobile version with the newer files as well, but there is no significant disadvantage to using it today. We do not yet have a meeting point where we could just have one project, but we are hoping in the future it does merge into one :)

Answer 3

It depends on approach. Use HTML5 BP if you are going to have same mark-up for you mobile and desktop website. but if you are making separate website for mobile then go for Mobile Boiler Plate