20 Snippets You should be using from Html5 Boilerplate
Matthew Corner
I recently, as many web designers and developers will have, became aware of a fantastic resource put together by web developer, Paul Irish, and Divya Manian. Html5 Boilerplate, as they have named it, is a powerful starting off point for any website or web application. As Paul Irish describes it; “It’s essentially a good starting template of html and css and a folder structure that works., but baked into it is years of best practices from front-end development professionals.”
It is absolutely packed full of fantastic snippets of code that are still very much worth using even if you don’t want to start using html5 boilerplate as your base template.
Html
We will start off by checking out some of the html snippets used in the resource. All of these are snippets of code that may not necessarily be only html, but will definitely be placed in your html files if used.
Favicon and Apple icons
The favicon is pretty much normality these day. the interesting bit here is the apple-touch-icon which is used if you save a bookmark to your home screen on an apple touch device such as an iPad or iPhone. Interestingly enough, android also supports its usage. As far as I can tell, the apple-touch-icon size is 60px by 60px. As the comment says, if your icons are in the root of your domain, these links aren’t required.
<!-- Place favicon.ico and apple-touch-icon.png in the root of your domain and delete these references --> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico"> <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/apple-touch-icon.png">
Faster page load hack
This empty conditional comment hack is used to basically increase performance of your site. When conditional comments are used on your site, for example, for an ie6 conditional stylesheet, it will block further downloads until the css files are fully downloaded, hence increasing load time. To solve this issue, an empty conditional comment, like below, is used before any css is loaded in the document, and the problem will be solved! For further reading, check out this article.
<!--[if IE]><![endif]-->
X-UA-Compatible
Internet Explorer has many rendering engines ready for use. What this line of code basically does is force IE to use the most up to date rendering engine that it has available, so that your pages will render as well as possible. It then goes on to talk about Chrome Frame. Chrome Frame is a plugin for IE6, 7, and 8 which brings all the rendering, and js power of Google Chrome to IE. If the user has it installed, we render our site using it. For more information on Chrome Frame, and how you can even prompt users without it to install it, check here.
<!-- Always force latest IE rendering engine (even in intranet) & Chrome Frame --> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">
Conditional body tag
This snippet is a Paul Irish original, and allows you to target IE browsers specifically without having to add in an extra http request with another separate stylesheet. Basically, depending on the IE browser that the user is using, a class is added to the body tag. If the user is not using IE, then a classless body tag is used. This allows you to target specific browsers in your css without having to use css hacks, or further stylesheets. For further reading, check out the original article on this.
<!--[if lt IE 7 ]> <body class="ie6"> <![endif]--> <!--[if IE 7 ]> <body class="ie7"> <![endif]--> <!--[if IE 8 ]> <body class="ie8"> <![endif]--> <!--[if IE 9 ]> <body class="ie9"> <![endif<]--> <!--[if (gt IE 9)|!(IE)]><!--> <!--<![endif]-->
jQuery loading fallback
A vast majority of sites these days make use of the jQuery JavaScript library. A vast majority also make use of Google’s hosted version of the library for faster loading speed’s, and better cross site caching. However, what if there is ever a problem and jQuery is not loaded from Google? Well here is your backup. What it basically does is check if jQuery is loaded from Google. If not, then we load it locally from our own version of jQuery.
<!-- Grab Google CDN's jQuery. fall back to local if necessary -->
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>!window.jQuery && document.write('<script src="js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"><\/script>')</script>
Optimised Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a very popular tool for tracking your website’s user behaviour, and visits. This is simply an optimised version of Google’s asynchronous tracking snippet. To learn what has been optimised, and why it is faster than Google’s own version, read the article here.
<!-- asynchronous google analytics
change the UA-XXXXX-X to be your site's ID -->
<script>
var _gaq = [['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X'], ['_trackPageview']];
(function(d, t) {
var g = d.createElement(t),
s = d.getElementsByTagName(t)[0];
g.async = true;
g.src = '//www.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
s.parentNode.insertBefore(g, s);
})(document, 'script');
</script>
Css
Moving on into Css, this is where the vast majority of awesome snippets care to be found. Don’t be put off by some of the one-liners; they are just as useful and awesome as some of the larger snippets to be found.
Html5 ready reset
Plenty of you will have used Eric Meyer’s css reset before now. It is included in many frameworks and so on, like 960.gs. This is a revamped version of that reset, that brings it into the present with full support for html5. It sets all the new structural tags as block level, and resets all their default styling as expected.
/* html5doctor.com Reset Stylesheet (Eric Meyer's Reset Reloaded + HTML5 baseline) v1.4 2009-07-27 | Authors: Eric Meyer & Richard Clark html5doctor.com/html-5-reset-stylesheet/*/
html, body, div, span, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
abbr, address, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, img, ins, kbd, q, samp,
small, strong, sub, sup, var,
b, i,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td,
article, aside, figure, footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, section, menu,
time, mark, audio, video {
margin:0;
padding:0;
border:0;
outline:0;
font-size:100%;
vertical-align:baseline;
background:transparent;
}
article, aside, figure, footer, header,
hgroup, nav, section { display:block; }
nav ul { list-style:none; }
blockquote, q { quotes:none; }
blockquote:before, blockquote:after,
q:before, q:after { content:''; content:none; }
a { margin:0; padding:0; font-size:100%; vertical-align:baseline; background:transparent; }
ins { background-color:#ff9; color:#000; text-decoration:none; }
mark { background-color:#ff9; color:#000; font-style:italic; font-weight:bold; }
del { text-decoration: line-through; }
abbr[title], dfn[title] { border-bottom:1px dotted #000; cursor:help; }
/* tables still need cellspacing="0" in the markup */
table { border-collapse:collapse; border-spacing:0; }
hr { display:block; height:1px; border:0; border-top:1px solid #ccc; margin:1em 0; padding:0; }
input, select { vertical-align:middle; }
/* END RESET CSS */
Font normalisation
To get rid of rendering inconsistencies that can occur between browsers and OS’s when rendering fonts in pixels, this snippet allows you to size your fonts in such a way that the size and line-height will remain consistent across these platforms for your website. You will basically be setting your font sizes via percentages that can be found here.
/*
fonts.css from the YUI Library: developer.yahoo.com/yui/
Please refer to developer.yahoo.com/yui/fonts/ for font sizing percentages
*/
body { font:13px sans-serif; *font-size:small; *font:x-small; line-height:1.22; }
table { font-size:inherit; font:100%; }
select, input, textarea { font:99% sans-serif; }
Webkit font smoothing
This is anti-aliasing for webkit browsers, sadly only in Mac OSX. It basically makes your text render better, and make it more readable, without all the text thinning hacks that we have seen in the past. For further reading check out Tim Van Damme’s article on this.
/* maxvoltar.com/archive/-webkit-font-smoothing */
html { -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; }
Force scrollbar
Sometimes, pages can be shorter than the browser view-port, and when you load a page on the same site that has longer content and uses a scrollbar, content can jump side to side. By forcing a scrollbar no matter the height of our content, we stop this small, but annoying issue.
html { overflow-y: scroll; }
Formatting quoted code
This snippet simply makes the text wrap when it reaches the walls of its container, in this case, the pre tag, whilst still preserving line breaks and white space cross browser. To read up on this, have a look at this article.
pre {
padding: 15px;
white-space: pre; /* CSS2 */
white-space: pre-wrap; /* CSS 2.1 */
white-space: pre-line; /* CSS 3 (and 2.1 as well, actually) */
word-wrap: break-word; /* IE */
}
Aligning Labels
Alignment of labels with their relevant inputs can be a horrible task to achieve in older browsers. This snippets solves that for us by making it consistent across browsers!
/* align checkboxes, radios, text inputs with their label */
input[type="radio"] { vertical-align: text-bottom; }
input[type="checkbox"] { vertical-align: bottom; *vertical-align: baseline; }
.ie6 input { vertical-align: text-bottom; }
Clickable inputs
For some reason, most browsers don’t apply a pointer cursor to some clickable input’s by default to let the user now that this item is clickable, so we solve this by doing it ourselves.
/* hand cursor on clickable input elements */
label, input[type=button], input[type=submit], button { cursor: pointer; }
Screenreader access
This snippet basically gives us the best of both worlds, allowing the best usability when it comes to link outlines for both screenreaders tabbing through links, and mouse users. To learn more, read this article.
a:hover, a:active { outline: none; }
a, a:active, a:visited { color:#607890; }
a:hover { color:#036; }
IE7 image resizing
Ie7 by default uses an image resizing algorithm that means that scaled down images can look far from awesome. To solve this, we simply enable a much better resizing algorithm that is available in Ie7 that produces results similar to what you’d expect from most image editing software. To read more about this, and similar solutions for Ie6, read this insightful article by the Flickr developers.
/* bicubic resizing for non-native sized IMG:
code.flickr.com/blog/2008/11/12/on-ui-quality-the-little-things-client-side-image-resizing/ */
.ie7 img { -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; }
Print styles
Any decent site should be print ready, as even though we live in a technology driven time, people still like to have a hard copy of some information. This snippet firstly uses a css media declaration, allowing you to include this in your main stylesheet, and not having to place another link in the head of your document. This benefits load time, as even when the page inst being printed, a browser will always download that extra css file, generating an extra http request. The snippet then goes on to include some useful print styles such as printing our link urls, and so on.
/*
* print styles
* inlined to avoid required HTTP connection www.phpied.com/delay-loading-your-print-css/
*/
@media print {
* { background: transparent !important; color: #444 !important; text-shadow: none; }
a, a:visited { color: #444 !important; text-decoration: underline; }
a:after { content: " (" attr(href) ")"; }
abbr:after { content: " (" attr(title) ")"; } .ir a:after { content: ""; } /* Don't show links for images */ pre, blockquote { border: 1px solid #999; page-break-inside: avoid; } img { page-break-inside: avoid; }
@page { margin: 0.5cm; }
p, h2, h3 { orphans: 3; widows: 3; }
h2, h3{ page-break-after: avoid; }
}
Device orientation
These are just two css media queries you may want to use for your website development. With lots of smart-phones, and tablets being able to orientate their screens from landscape to portrait, you may want to include different styles for each. This is how you would go about achieving this.
@media all and (orientation:portrait) {
/* Style adjustments for portrait mode goes here */
}
@media all and (orientation:landscape) {
/* Style adjustments for landscape mode goes here */
}
.htaccess
One thing that html5 boilerplate does come with that other starting point templates generally don’t is server sided files. Check out these awesome .htaccess snippets that can easily improve your site.
X-UA-Compatible Server sided
This is the same as the html version mentioned above, forcing the latest rendering engine in IE, and Chrome Frame if it exists. The benefit of including this in your .htaccess file is that it saves you having to declare this in the head of each and every html document you produce.
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
BrowserMatch MSIE ie
Header set X-UA-Compatible "IE=Edge,chrome=1" env=ie
IfModule>
IfModule>
Gzip compression
Gzip compression allows us to drastically reduce out file sizes. This .htaccess snippet does the gzipping for us.
# gzip compression.
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
# html, xml, css, and js:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript text/javascript application/javascript application/json
# webfonts and svg:
<FilesMatch "\.(ttf|otf|eot|svg)$" >
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</FilesMatch>
</IfModule>
Expiry date for cache filetypes
When we cache our files on the user’s machine, we may want to specify how long they remain there, depending on how often we change them ourselves. This snippet provides basic times for common file types, some of which you may wish to change for your own site.
# these are pretty far-future expires headers # they assume you control versioning with cachebusting query params like # <script src="application.js?20100608"> # additionally, consider that outdated proxies may miscache # www.stevesouders.com/blog/2008/08/23/revving-filenames-dont-use-querystring/ # if you don't use filenames to version, lower the css and js to something like # "access plus 1 week" or so <IfModule mod_expires.c> Header set cache-control: public ExpiresActive on # Perhaps better to whitelist expires rules? Perhaps. ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month" # cache.manifest needs re-reqeusts in FF 3.6 (thx Remy ~Introducing HTML5) ExpiresByType text/cache-manifest "access plus 0 seconds" # your document html ExpiresByType text/html "access" # rss feed ExpiresByType application/rss+xml "access plus 1 hour" # favicon (cannot be renamed) ExpiresByType image/vnd.microsoft.icon "access plus 1 week" # media: images, video, audio ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType video/ogg "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType audio/ogg "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType video/mp4 "access plus 1 month" # webfonts ExpiresByType font/ttf "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType font/woff "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/svg+xml "access plus 1 month" # css and javascript ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 month" </IfModule> # Since we're sending far-future expires, we don't need ETags for # static content. # developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html #etags FileETag None
Further thoughts
I strongly suggest you go check out Html5 Boilerplate. It is a fantastic resource that houses all of these snippets and more, that I am sure you will find useful.
For Further Reading:
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MadRukus
Posted 617 days ago 28Thanks for the tips and screen cast link above
Codeforest
Posted 620 days ago 27Really great tips taken from Boilerplate. Thanks
Maicon Sobczak
Posted 621 days ago 26Great tips! I already use the HTML 5 reset and print reset. Tweeted.
geoff
Posted 622 days ago 25Hey Matthew, thanks for taking the time to write and post this up. really useful resource.
cancel bubble
Posted 622 days ago 24Paul has a 40 minute screencast/walkthrough of HTML5 Boilerplate which is definitely worth watching:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/the-official-guide-to-html5-boilerplate/
Phil
Posted 622 days ago 23The webkit font smoothing css has been removed from boilerplate I believe due to the fact that is makes certain fonts (such as monospace) too thin to read.
Cipa
Posted 593 days ago 35Even regular fonts looked worse on my machine. Even in Chrome.
And from the look of the home page it hasn’t been removed
John Macpherson
Posted 622 days ago 22Great write up, many little tips and tricks in there that i didn’t know.
Thanks!
Ilia
Posted 623 days ago 21Good breakdown of the code.
In regards to the empty conditional statement, it seems that if instead of using conditional statements on BODY tag, they’re used on HTML tag, that empty one becomes unnecessary.
http://paulirish.com/2008/conditional-stylesheets-vs-css-hacks-answer-neither/
In that discussion it’s also pointed out that you could use more granular classes for the BODY tag, i.e. instead of class=”ie6″ and class=”ie7″ for example, it would be class=”ie ie7 lte9 lte8 lte7″ and class=”ie ie8 lte9 lte8″ and so on.
Personally this seems a bit much, but I like the idea of a bit more detail in the classes, I think I would go with the following solution
<!–[if lt IE 7]> <html class="ie ie6"> <![endif]–>
<!–[if IE 7]> <html class="ie ie7"> <![endif]–>
<!–[if IE 8]> <html class="ie ie8"> <![endif]–>
<!–[if IE 9]> <html class="ie ie9"> <![endif]–>
<!–[if (gt IE 9)|!(IE)]><!–> <html> <!–<![endif]–>
(hopefully the above code comes out okay :))
Jonah Brown
Posted 623 days ago 20Change this:
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
BrowserMatch MSIE ie
Header set X-UA-Compatible "IE=Edge,chrome=1" env=ie
IfModule>
IfModule>
To:
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
BrowserMatch MSIE ie
Header set X-UA-Compatible "IE=Edge,chrome=1" env=ie
</IfModule>
</IfModule>
Jonah brown
Posted 623 days ago 19You should fix this code:
[CODE]
BrowserMatch MSIE ie
Header set X-UA-Compatible “IE=Edge,chrome=1″ env=ie
IfModule>
IfModule>[/CODE]
to:
[CODE]
BrowserMatch MSIE ie
Header set X-UA-Compatible “IE=Edge,chrome=1″ env=ie
[/CODE]
Alex Flueras
Posted 623 days ago 16Really nice roundup. I really like the HTML5 reset. Thanks.
Nathaniel
Posted 624 days ago 15I’ll have to check out HTML5 Boilerplate to see what may be useful in it, but I think that programmers shouldn’t be lead astray by thinking life is easier when one adds a massive layer of complication to what is already going on in a browser. KISS – is a good acronym, and policy to follow.
I suggest always learning how these self acclaimed silver bullets work, but code your website yourself, from scratch. Especially when you are starting out. Then if you feel the need you are far better prepared to add in another’s code, if you still desire it.
The truth is, anyone who has been programing for some time has their own boiler plate of sorts that they use on every website. The difference is the coder knows it inside and out which makes it easier to track down bugs.
Thierry Koblentz
Posted 624 days ago 14The original http://html5boilerplate.com/ credits the authors of the snippets, but these links have been removed from most snippets you’ve copied. :-(
Mexicali
Posted 624 days ago 13Thanks, very usefull post guys.
DJaVuPixel
Posted 624 days ago 12Great post thanks! I will bookmark it :)
cooljaz124
Posted 624 days ago 11Nice post. I too have checked Html Boiler Plate a couple of days ago and found the details of commenting, very helpful. And very nice to see you spend your time on this and explaning a bit more on each.
The best way is to use HTML Boiler Plate along than using code snippets seperately.
Maxime
Posted 625 days ago 9I was just diving into Html5 Boilerplate, thank you for your article and these additional explanations!
Gopalb
Posted 625 days ago 8Very nice article…..
Daniel
Posted 625 days ago 7This line: !window.jQuery && document.write(”)
Breaks my layout somehow, I can see the closing parenthesis before the last closing script when I see the page in the browser.
Daniel
Posted 625 days ago 10Nevermind, I’t was a problem with a file. now it’s working.
Freizeitler
Posted 626 days ago 6Great post. I strongly recommend to use the entire boilerplate as the base for your projects and when finished delete the parts not in use. It works very well (fantastic browser support, f.e.) and saves a lot of time. The boilerplate really rocks and it will become common standard for the use of HTML5…
Agobox
Posted 626 days ago 5Very nice work on snippets.
Alan
Posted 626 days ago 4Great article Matt, been testing the water with this Boilerplate lately and still wasn’t sure whether to go ahead and start adopting it.
But a break down of the main plus points has really helped.
David
Posted 626 days ago 3Thank Matthew – I was thinking of doing the same thing as all the above but you beat me to it and have saved me some time too!
David
Johan
Posted 626 days ago 2I get “unterminated string literal” för this line:
!window.jQuery && document.write(”)
Is that ok?
Capich
Posted 623 days ago 17I have the same problem… :S
Emerge
Posted 623 days ago 18I’ve the same porblem. The correct line is:
!window.jQuery && document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’your_local_path’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”))
Martin
Posted 627 days ago 1Excellent snippet list here!
Surprisingly I just tweeted the force scrollbar part a while ago
html { overflow-y: scroll; }
I really dislike the effect it can have on a page/site when a srollbar is not shown. That page jumping is really nasty.