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h5bp
html5-boilerplate
JavaScript2012–2026
h5bp / html5-boilerplate

html5-boilerplate

A professional front-end template for building fast, robust, and adaptable web apps or sites.

31Distinct people
37Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
57.7KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A professional front-end template for building fast, robust, and adaptable web apps or sites.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year37 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2012-01-25 03:33:34 UTC to 2026-01-05 11:25:03 UTC.

0369122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 3 submissions, 7 comments20122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 2 submissions, 10 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1037
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC12210
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
HTML5 Boilerplate HTML5 Boilerplate is a professional front-end template for building fast, robust, and adaptable web apps or sites. This project is the product of over 10 years of iterative development and community knowledge. It does not impose a specific development philosophy or framework, so you're free to architect your code in the way that you want. Homepage Source Code About This Repository This repository is where HTML5-Boilerplate is authored. Some of the tools, files and processes that you see here are solely for the production of HTML5 Boilerplate and are not part of HTML5 Boilerplate. For one example, the gulpfile.mjs script is used to build the project. It's not part of the project itself. The project we publish is represented by the contents of the /dist/ folder. Everything else in this repository is used to author the project. Think of it this way, in the same way that you don't clone vuejs/core to create a Vue.js app, you don't need to clone this repository to start a new site or app based on HTML5 Boilerplate. So, if you're looking for a quick start template to build a website or application, look at the options in the Quick Start section of this document. If you want to help us improve HTML5 Boilerplate then you can start with the documentation here, which includes steps to clone this repo in order to get it set up for development. Quick Start Choose one of the following options: Using the create-html5-boilerplate script, instantly fetch the latest npm published package (or any version available on npm) with npx, npm init or yarn create without having to install any dependencies. Running the following npx command installs the latest version into a folder called new-site npx create-html5-boilerplate new-site cd new-site npm install npm run start Using our new Template Repository create a new GitHub repository based on the latest code from the main branch of HTML5 Boilerplate. Install with npm: npm install html5-boilerplate or yarn: yarn add html5-boilerplate. The resulting node_modules/html5-boilerplate/dist folder represents the latest version of the project for end users. Depending on what you want to use and how you want to use it, you may have to copy and paste the contents of that folder into your project directory. Download the latest stable release from here. This zip file is a snapshot of the dist folder. On Windows, Mac and from the file manager on Linux unzipping this folder will output to a folder named something like html5-boilerplate_v9.0.0. From the command-line, you will need to create a folder and unzip the contents into that folder. mkdir html5-boilerplate unzip html5-boilerplate*.zip -d html5-boilerplate Features A finely-tuned starter template: Reap the benefits of 10 years of analysis, research and experimentation by over 200 contributors. Designed with progressive enhancement in mind. Includes: Placeholder Open Graph elements and attributes. An example package.json file with WebPack commands built in to jumpstart application development. Placeholder CSS Media Queries. Useful CSS helper classes. Default print styles, performance optimized. "Delete-key friendly." Easy to strip out parts you don't need. Extensive documentation. Browser Support HTML5-Boilerplate supports the latest, stable releases of all major browsers. Check the default configuration from Browserslist for more details on browsers and versions covered. Documentation Take a look at the documentation table of contents. This documentation is bundled with the project which makes it available for offline reading and provides a useful starting point for any documentation you want to write about your project. Contributing Hundreds of developers have helped to make the HTML5 Boilerplate. Anyone is welcome to contribute. However, if you decide to get involved, please take a moment to review the guidelines: Bug reports Feature requests Pull requests License The code is available under the MIT license.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

37 sources
Wasn't this moved into Modernizr? There's a library I haven't thought of in a long time. Oh, yep. There it is at the bottom: > April 2011: IEPP v2 comes out. Modernizr and the html5shiv inherit the latest code. Meanwhile developers everywhere continue to use HTML5 elements in a cross-browser fashion without worry. Paul Irish also started (or helped start) the html5 boilerplate project[1], which I am surprised to see is still actively being developed. I relied on that boilerplate a lot earlier in my career (started full-time in 2011). If you want another blast of nostalgia, check out the earlier releases[2,3] of it. I'm so happy I don't have to use conditional IE statements in my html anymore 1. https://html5boilerplate.com/ 2. https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/tree/v0.9 3. https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/tree/v0.9.5
In The HTML5 Shiv (2011)
Not sure why this became a trend my guess is back when everyone was trying to update their website to support mobile devices, they want to deliver an 'app-like' experience and as native apps don't let you pinch zoom the native UI wherever you like and mobile sites followed suit. I guess the issue now is it has become part of the cargo cult with people including these meta tags in their base templates without knowing what it does and failing to implement a suitable layout for all mobile device screen sizes and DPIs. https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/main/src/inde...
In Please stop disabling zoom
> “monospace fonts tend to be wider, so the default font size (medium) is scaled so that they have similar widths” > “the base size depends on the font family and the language … Default system fonts are often really ugly for non-Latin- using scripts.” ‘often’, ‘tend to be’: I am worried. I think it’s a really bad idea to deflect default behavior based on such assumptions, certainly when the deviations are a blind process triggered by proxies (like language tags and some vaguely statistical rules-of-thumb for dealing with generic font family names). That is: without even looking at the actual design and metrics of the actual font involved.¹ What happens if the monospaced font in case has a normal x-height and/or an advance-width equal to that of its serif counterpart? What if the CJK and Devanagari fonts have characters drawn already ‘big
Read the rest
on the body’?² Then such hard-coded default moonshot-fixes which try to cater for the lowest common denominator will make things needlessly hard to debug and force the designer still to ad-hoc size-adjust font per font, but now also trying to fix the browser’s ‘fixes’. (Too bad: any `normalize.css` wont help…³) And yet, all of the needed data is available in the font file. There’s even a dedicated CSS property for dealing with fonts’ varying metrics: `font-size-adjust`.⁴ Not that browser makers care to implement⁵, but since the OP’s post concerns Firefox (which does support `font-size-adjust`, but the article does not discuss it) I wonder: is it a matter of performance that retrieving the actual font metadata and metrics is left out of the equation? Surely, the fact that local font files, base64 data-URI embedded or externally hosted ones can be used, makes implementation all but trivial… At Textus.io⁶ we’re going great lengths to solve typographic issues such as these. Point in case: for each font we read out the `xHeight` value, then calculate the actual font-size relative to the font’s UPM (unitsPerEm), so we have consistent apparent font-sizes, c.q. aspect ratios. I think it all boils down to a separation of concerns: proportion and interrelated sizes (ascender, caps, descender, x heights, stem width, etc.) are up to the discretion of the font designer, overall aspect size is the business of the typesetter (css stylesheet author), and the browser ought always draw consistently, regardless of generic font family name, language and/or Unicode code range. ¹ https://opentype.js.org/font-inspector.html ² https://medium.com/@xtianmiller/your-body-text-is-too-small-... ³ https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/issues/724 ⁴ https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/CSS/font-size-adju... ⁵ http://caniuse.com/#feat=font-size-adjust ⁶ http://www.textus.io
In Implementing Font-Size in Servo: An Unexpectedly Complex CSS Property
First, research on hit factor: https://zoompf.com/blog/2010/01/should-you-use-javascript-li... http://statichtml.com/2011/google-ajax-libraries-caching.htm... https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/pull/1327#issuecom... I have more recent data on this that is not yet published from my day-to-day work at a web performance company. The pictures has improved somewhat, but not significantly. You are correct, "Overheads of fetching library from a CDN are applicable to the first request" The problem is, because of the fragmentation, every website is asking you to hit a different URL, so every request is a "first request". You aren't leveraging the browser cache. Most sites are already serving you site-specific JS anyway over a warm connection (even more so with HTTP/2), so there is even less benefit to going to a 3rd party host to potentiall
Read the rest
y avoid downloading a few dozen kilobytes. Couple that with the security implications of injecting 3rd party code into your page, its just plain silly and wasteful to do this for a modern website.
In Things to Know When Making a Web Application in 2015
> PR are not the place for jokes. There's a well-established tradition of pull requests and issues being used for commentary and humor. Here's a selection. The first one is by the founder CEO of a company with a ~$1B valuation that's prepping for an IPO and is very similar to the one everyone here is complaining about. The second one has comments from a couple well-known tech folks. And so on... https://github.com/saberma/shopqi/pull/409 https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/pull/1074 https://github.com/ericf/yui3-gallery/pull/21 https://github.com/WhiteHouse/fortyfour/issues https://github.com/joyent/node/pull/2472 But apparently now that Microsoft is using GitHub, everything is Serious Business™? Is there a dress code now, too?
In MSBuild is now open source on GitHub
Actually, these shared "JavaScript CDNs" actually slow down your site. http://zoompf.com/blog/2010/01/should-you-use-javascript-lib... http://statichtml.com/2011/google-ajax-libraries-caching.htm... tl;dr: the URLs are too fragmented to get cache hits for commonly used shared libraries, so you end up having to do a DNS lookup and download them over a cold TCP/HTTP connection. This is slower than simply serving the 20-30KB of data directly from you own site. Update even more recent stats from 2013. The Html5 boiler plate project decided against shared JavaScript CDNs: https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/pull/1327
In Injection of malicious code into jQuery is increasing

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