FAQ

Why is this different from HTML5 Boilerplate?

HTML5 Boilerplate is an excellent yet minimalist and high-quality starting point for general front-end projects where you want to start from near scratch and build the layers of your projects up yourself.

We want developers developers building multi-screen experiences to hit the ground running a little faster, which is why we build on the excellent work done by the HTML5 Boilerplate and mobile HTML5 Boilerplate teams to define a setup including responsive layouts, powerful performance optimization and cross-device tooling and a visual style guide. We've found these tools useful in our own workflows building multi-device apps and think other developers may benefit from the same.

Does this replace Yeoman?

Yo is a fantastic scaffolding tool and Yeoman is a great workflow for creating new webapps, bringing a wealth of tooling to the table for those using different tech stacks and frameworks. One of the downsides of using Yeoman however is that it's hard to find a generator with a great mobile baseline. Even then, you need to install all of the dependencies for new projects up-front. Web Starter Kit allows you to download our project in just a click and get started in seconds. You're in control of whether you use any of our optional tooling. A Yeoman generator for using Web Starter Kit will eventually be made available.

Why did you not choose Grunt?

Gulp is an expressive, streaming build system which brings a terse, easy to use configuration setup we feel benefits those using front-end built tooling. We enjoy using it for speed and task composability. Although Grunt is a fantastic tool with a rich ecosystem of existing plugins, it comes with a level of over-configuration when it comes to simple tasks. The team working on Web Starter Kit continue to use love both tools, but felt Gulp would be a better fit for our users needs.

Should we use this or Bootstrap or Zurb, how does this relate to them?

Bootstrap, Zurb and similar libraries provide an excellent solution for prototyping your apps but one of the biggest challenges with them is that it’s (almost too) easy to get stuck using their styles, look and feel for the lifetime of your application. We think this leads to poorer experience on the multi-screen web. In Web Starter Kit, we provide you a boilerplate set of base styles and a visual style guide for your components but we actively encourage you to change these to suit your own app. This may require a little more work, but the reality is that any serious project is going to have it’s own look and feel and we want you to feel comfortable changing the kit to suit your own needs.