Welcome to the review of the 4th course in the HTML5 Learning Path on Pluralsight.

Get Started With HTML5 Boilerplate is the shortest course in this learning path, at only 58 minutes length at normal playback speed. It is authored by  lead web developer Chris Reynolds.

Chris begins by explaining the HTML5 Boilerplate is a template rather than a framework, which is available on github.

The easiest way to download HTML5 Boilerplate is through html5boilerplate.com

As well as watching this course (or while you’re watching it) you might also want to read the FAQ and Usage docs, although these are also available as markdown files in the source code.

Introduction

Chris describes the history of the project, and reveals that many websites based on HTML5 Boilerplate are showcased at h5bp.net.

While looking inside h5bp, Chris mentions normalize.css. which makes browsers render all elements more consistently and in line with modern standards.

While explaining how to use h5bp, Chris introduces Ant Build Script, and quickly runs through main.css which includes a browse happy prompt.

Included in the index.html is a google analytics block of code which you will need to update (or remove if you don’t use it).

In the demo, Chris uses Sublime Text and he explains how to use the Fetch plugin.

HTML5 Boilerplate in Depth

This begins with a look at the index.html, followed by the 404.html

Then we see the CSS files including main.css

Next we look at the JavaScript files, such as plugins.js

Regarding .htaccess, the apache server configs are a separate project from h5bp

Chris also explains the crossdomain.xml file

Getting HTML5 Boilerplate

The main website download link is just one of several ways to get h5bp, and Chris explains all of your options with their pros and cons.

Chris like to use Atlassian Source Tree, which is a free cross platform Mercurial and Git client.

H5BP is also one of the configuration options available on initializr – this is really nice because it is a very quick way to choose exactly what you want without needing to manually remove what you don’t need.

Building with HTML5 Boilerplate

In this module Chris builds an example e-commerce site using H5bp.