Getting Started with HTML5 Boilerplate will enable you to master setting up new projects with minimal effort and deploy them to production in the most effective manner with the least time spent while also ensuring robust performance. It takes you through a step-by-step process of creating a website and teaches you to take full advantage of the defaults provided within HTML5 Boilerplate, be it styles, mark up, or code, so that you can accomplish your goals with as few cross-browser issues as possible.
Chapter 1, Before We Begin, covers all you need to get set up for your projects to use HTML5 Boilerplate without much effort. We also broadly look at the files that are included as part of this project and how they help you.
Chapter 2, Starting Your Project, covers how to get started with HTML5 Boilerplate with an example, single page website. In this chapter, we look at the basic essentials of configuring the default setup that works for your project.
Chapter 3, Creating Your Site, covers how to customize the styles and the markup of your website along with some tips on how to take advantage of HTML5 Boilerplate's default style options.
Chapter 4, Adding Interactivity and Completing Your Site, will help you discover how to do feature-detection, add some interactivity with JavaScript, and finalize your website implementation.
Chapter 5, Customizing the Server, looks at how you can ensure that your website gets loaded as quickly as possible by using HTML5 Boilerplate's custom configurations for the web servers that host your site.
Chapter 6, Making Your Site Better, looks at the optional features that can also be used to provide a better experience for the users of your site, which would fit well with HTML5 Boilerplate.
Chapter 7, Automate Deployment With the Build Script, helps you to make your sites ready to be deployed live by looking at the Build Script that provides tools to minify CSS, JS, HTML, and images.
Appendix, You Are an Expert, Now What? covers some basics of unit testing and provides additional research information on some of the decisions that were arrived at for the features that HTML5 Boilerplate provides.
As we will be working on a website, we will need the following basic tools to get our work done:
A text editor that you are comfortable using with; SublimeText is recommended with. If you do not have one yet, please download it from sublimetext.com/.
Apache Web Server (available from httpd.apache.org) to apply HTML5 Boilerplate's server configurations.
A browser to verify the rendering of your website on the screen. Chrome is recommended, because its developer tools are available for debugging. Download Chrome from google.com/chrome.
Git, for making sure software is under version control; download it from git-scm.com.
You also obviously need HTML5 Boilerplate, which you can download from html5boilerplate.com.
This book is for all the authors who are familiar with creating web projects using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No in-depth knowledge is necessary. Some knowledge of what a web server is and how it can be configured is good to have. Also, you should not be afraid to use the command-line tool (fear not! There are links within the book that should make you less afraid). There are no expectations that you should know about HTML5 Boilerplate, except that you only try it once to see if it works for you.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "However, Normalize.css makes sure that these default styles are consistent across all browsers."
A block of code is set as follows:
header h1 {
background-image: url('/img/heading-banner.png');
width: 800px;
height: 300px;
}New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "The following screenshot shows how the Skip Navigation link is instantly visible when the user switches keyboard focus to it."
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