Standing room only, and a waiting list besides–what was the attraction bringing so many to the tech college conference room at Fisherman’s Wharf?
Haloed at one end of the room by the glaring video lamp, a man, a laptop, and the new way you should build the front-end of your Web app. Ladies and gentlemen, presenting Paul Irish, in turn presenting the HTML5 Boilerplate.
There’s much you can gain just downloading it, of course. You could opt to pick through the unzipped goodies and apply them piecemeal to your aging markup, refinishing your early 21st-century XHTML with some latter-day varnish. But there’s a lot more in the Boilerplate than too-hasty reading of the docs will reveal.
Irish, one of the mod squad behind the informative and massively entertaining YayQuery podcast, delivered a quick, focused survey of the Boilerplate’s many benefits to those eager to follow advice like Steve Souders’s 14+ rules. Among these is a customized .htaccess file, for those of us with good intentions of, say, gzip’ping assets but only rudimentary Apache admin skills–that’s worth the attention of a full room all by itself. Another is the built-in provision of QUnit: no more chasing this down to install separately. And coming along in the bright future is the Boilerplate for mobile.
Build an ant!?
But best of all is the build script. No wonder Irish calls it his favorite part of the Boilerplate.
Here’s where mere mortal front-end devs can finally scale the Olympus of best practices. Need to combine your CSS files? Your JavaScript? Optimize, minify, them? Remove test suite leavings? Excise all those dangerous calls to console.log? Boilerplate’s build script does this for you. Hurrah; I didn’t need yet another checklist to consult.
I was gratified to hear someone take HTML seriously. For too long writing markup‘s been dismissed as a simple, easily acquired technique that any drooling idiot can/should perform. Now there are Meetups full of software engineers anxious to learn things like table-less layout. Hah! Isn’t the Web fun?
Tags: development, html5, innovation, meetups, tools
