I’m looking at the future of the HTML5 Boilerplate (H5BP) organization and repos right now and, in addition to formulating plans for the existing projects, I’ve decided to try something new.

Maintenance of the existing projects is vital, but passive stewardship isn’t enough for where I’m at right now. The web changes too quickly. AI is generating incredible volumes of code and that influx of bloated, unoptimized code requires a counterweight of strict engineering discipline.

So this week, I decided to expand the footprint of @h5bp to act as an active open-source incubator for new projects and emerging engineering talent.

Why an Incubator?

Throughout my career leading engineering teams, mentoring builders has been the most rewarding work I’ve done. The open-source world can be incredibly daunting for a developer looking to scale a project from a personal repository to an industry standard.

By incubating projects within H5BP, we aim to provide independent creators with the operational framework, automation experience, and community visibility required to build high-integrity open source software at scale.

Enforcing Strict Governance

We have just released our Project Inclusion Guidelines. To be considered for the incubator, a project must demonstrate:

• Permissive Licensing: Strict MIT alignment.
• Lean Architecture: Minimal or zero runtime dependencies to protect performance budgets.
• Supply Chain Security: Clean, verifiable dependency graphs to limit organization-level vulnerability.

Submit a Proposal

If you are engineering modern web utilities, or foundational developer tools under strict architectural constraints, we want to hear from you.

Review our new PROPOSAL_GUIDELINES.md, check out the active PR, and submit your Request for Comments (RFC) directly in our meta repository.

Let’s build the next generation of web infrastructure.