HTML5 Boilerplate v7 released

After a few months of starts and stops while I wrestled my SVG book into submission and released main.css as a standalone project, I’m pleased to announce that HTML5 Boilerplate v7 was released on Friday February 8, 2019.

The biggest change is the way that we include the aforementioned main.css. Since it’s now a standalone project we include it as an npm dependency at build-time. This change still allows people (including HTML5 Boilerplate itself) to consume main.css as a whole, but also allows the component styles to be used individually in different, and hopefully interesting, ways. You can access the component styles to mix and match directly through the main.css npm package.

We also dropped support for IE9/10. That was not as cathartic as dropping support for IE6 or IE8, but it was still nice. It feels like we’re living in the future.

The docs also got a big upgrade. We could use more help there, but we’ve done a couple of really good passes at the documentation and I think it’s in a good place now.

Thanks again to Christian Oliff for his work on this release. He’s proven to be an invaluable team member over the past couple of years. I really appreciate his help on tasks and his attention to detail.

And, as always, thanks to our many contributors. You are the best!

Are you interested in helping out? Check out our current issues, submit an idea for a new feature or look at one of the other H5BP projects to see if there’s something else you’re interested in helping with. It’s fun.

Here’s the full release notes:

7.0.0 (February 8, 2019)

  • Drop support for IE9/IE10 (#2074)
  • Move the CSS to a separate repo (#2066)
  • Add theme-color meta tag to index.html (#2074)
  • Add ‘install with yarn’ steps to README (#2063)
  • Improved Webmanifest (#2060)
  • Upgrade Normalize to 8.0.1 (#2104)
  • Update .htaccess (#2110)
  • Remove instances of shrink-to-fit=no (#2103)
  • Removes “display”: “standalone” from manifest (#2096)
  • Big Docs update – Fixed links, removed IE9/IE10 specific info, made touch icons section more concise, add details on security.txt and more tidying up (#2074, #2065, #2062)

Download the latest from github or install it from npm.

H5BP’s main.css Released as a Standalone Project

I just published the 1.0.0 release of main.css, a standalone version of the H5BP CSS file. The project serves as a repository for development of the file as well as a distribution channel for the component files as separate CSS files. The dist folder contains:

a list of files that ship with main.css- base.css, helpers.css, mqs.css, print.css  and main.css

This setup allows people (including HTML5 Boilerplate itself) to consume main.css as a whole, but also allows the component styles to be used individually in different, and hopefully interesting, ways.

If You Want to Share Code, Please Add a License

This has come up a few times recently (example), so I thought I’d point it out here for all the world to see.

If you’re sharing code on a blog, Github or anywhere else you think people might find it and want to use it, please license it in some way. If you don’t, it won’t be used the in the way you might want and expect.

Let me explain.

Many organizations are friendly to open source software. As a consultant and “agency dude”, I’ve seen far more companies that were happy to use open source software than companies who were completely freaked out by the prospect (although I have seen a few completely dysfunctional organizations that wanted to pay money for horrible solutions just because they had the fear.) This is a good thing because 10-15 years ago that wasn’t the case.

The thing is, and it seems some people don’t know this, unless you explicitly license your code, your software isn’t magically open source or free to use.

The lack of a copyright notice or license doesn’t mean you don’t have a copyright on it.

It is, in fact, the complete opposite.

In all countries where the Berne Convention standards apply, when you make software you automatically own all the rights to that software– even if your intent is for it to be free for everyone to use and you hate the very idea of software patents or copyright. Without a license allowing people to use your code within acceptable guidelines you are the only person that has a legal right to use it. While you probably won’t turn around and sue everybody that uses your code (because hey, you’re cool and you wanted to share it with everyone in the first place), there’s also nothing stopping you from changing your mind later and sending out nastygrams asking for big bucks from everyone who ever even sniffed at the code. Right or wrong, that would be your legal right.

And that’s why we need licenses. Any organization (or, really, individual developer) with any sense is going to steer clear of a situation where they might end up having to call their lawyers. Using software without explicit permission is exactly one of those situations.

So, if you’re doing anything that people might find interesting please think about how you’d like to see it used and add a license.

I use what’s commonly referred to as the MIT license because I can understand it and it allows people to do whatever they want with my code.

You might want to choose something else.

That’s cool, as long as you make a choice and let the rest of us know about it 🙂

Ant. Ant? Really?

Quick, if you were to guess a technology I’d be making commits on an open source project using, would Apache Ant be at the top of the list? I didn’t think so. But yet, here I am committing an Ant Build script to Paul’s excellent HTML5 Boilerplate project. It makes sense since I’ve done work on concatenation, minification and other performance enhancements using Ant, but it’s still a weird technology to be contributing to such a cool project with…

Continue reading “Ant. Ant? Really?”