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This is not your father's world wide web. Thanks to soaring smartphone sales, new tablet devices like the iPad, and the burgeoning trend of connected devices, individuals are accessing and experiencing the web in a very different way than they were even five years ago.

The desktop browsing experience is also undergoing radical change, thanks to the evolution of JavaScript frameworks and the push for standards successors such as CSS3 and HTML5. It's an exciting time to be developing or designing for the web.

Even for the seasoned developer, it can be difficult to know where to start if you want to embrace the new technologies of HTML5 and support new devices like the iPhone, Android-based smartphones or the iPad without neglecting users on older browsers. Fortunately, the collaborative nature of the web means that lots of developers and designers are working out best practices and solutions toward these problems together.

One of the most interesting new projects aimed at giving designers and developers a starting template for integrating HTML5 and other modern features into their sites is HTML5 Boilerplate.

Created by Paul Irish and Divya Manian, HTML5 Boilerplate is the product of more than two and a half years in iterative development, and it's chock-full of best practices and techniques for creating cross-browser compatible websites that will work with legacy browsers (which means IE 6) while also being HTML5-ready.







To be clear, HTML5 Boilerplate is not a framework. It's a template that can be modified and used for your own projects. You can use as much or as little as you want and make your own additions and subtractions. Still, it's one of the most robust and well-commented starting points we've seen for setting up a solid HTML5 base for your projects.

One of the best things about HTML5 Boilerplate is that the source is openly available under a public domain license; you can use it and integrate it into your own projects in any way you want.

As a result, a ton of awesome projects have already used HTML5 Boilerplate alongside other techniques. Just check out this page on GitHub to see a sampling of some of the HTML5 Boilerplate-infused spin-offs.

Check out these additional tools, projects and resources to get the most out of HTML5 Boilerplate:







We're really excited to see how HTML5 Boilerplate evolves and how other projects choose to integrate the template. It's a terrific starting point for many designers and developers who just don't have the time to pull all the little bits and information together when getting started with HTML5.

Are you using HTML5 in your designs? What tools are you using to ease the process? Let us know in the comments.

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Images courtesy of HTML Boilerplate.