HTML5 Boilerplate & HTML5 Reset

HTML5 Reset (by Monkeydo) and HTML5 Boilerplate (Paul Irish & Divya Manian) are new HTML5 project skeletons. If you’re about to start a new HTML5 site, you can reach for one of these all-in-one kits that include everything you need to write great, forward-looking code, while still maintaining support for legacy browsers.

HTML5 Reset and HTML5 Boilerplate have a heck of a lot in common. To name just a few: Both tools give you a standard directory structure for your project assets; Both include Modernizr to add support for HTML5 elements in browsers that don’t support them natively; And both have reset stylesheets to zero out browser differences.

Of the two offerings, HTML5 Reset is the more stripped down. Indeed, it even comes in both “bare bones” and “kitchen sink” flavors.

Both libraries do include jQuery by default, which strikes me as a little unnecessary, even though I understand the reasoning behind its inclusion. However, there’s nothing preventing you from using your library of choice (or no library at all) in either case.

Still, there are some interesting things in HTML5 Boilerplate that aren’t in HTML5 Reset. Boilerplate’s .htaccess file has some handy tricks for correctly serving SVG & webfonts, as well as ensuring that newer IEs won’t default to the older rendering engine. Also, the script that adds PNG support to IE6 is a new one to me. It’s very ingenious, and one I’ll probably use outside of the Boilerplate.

Even if you don’t end up using either of these project skeletons as-is, or at all, you should definitely take a look at both of them to see what you can steal from them.

Choco

Choco is a new client-side MVC framework. Unlike other such frameworks like Sproutcore or Cappuccino that have robust DSLs or even whole languages baked in to them, Choco lets you develop with, more or less, the same old HTML/CSS/Javascript you’ve been using all along. A lot of Choco looks fairly Rails-y (the directory structure, the command-line generators, among other features) but the overall experience still strives to be that of plain old web development.

Under the hood, Choco uses JS-Model for its model layer which is very cool, though it still doesn’t handle persistence. Also, Sammy does a lot of the heavy lifting in the controllers and on routing.

As awesome as Sproutcore & Cappuccino are, it’s pretty refreshing to see an approach that still looks a lot like the kind of web development we’re all used to. Kudos to the Choco team for a nice little tool.

Smoothie

Smoothie is a very slick new data visualization tool. However, Smoothie differs from the host of charting & graphing tools out there in that it’s built to handle live streaming data. It smoothly animates its graphs in real-time when new data arrives. Very cool stuff, and well worth taking a look at.