25 June 2014
After a big success of Twitter’s Bootstrap, comes WebStarterKit - the next generation mobile web framework from Google.
If you are still on the verge of using ready modules for front-end, try Smashing’s: Just because you can should you use Responsive Web Design frameworks? They give you not only a starting point but also all the building blocks you may need to create front-ends in the productive and bugless way.
Today's landscape of mobile web front-end frameworks consist of hundreds of tools but the list of the most popular, A to Z, would consist of 3:
- Mature: Twitter Bootstrap
- Runner-up: Foundation Framework
- Good ol’ HTML5Boilerplate
- Web Starter Kit
And here next candidate:
Web Starter Kit
Google‘s “A starting point for multi-device web development”. An implementation of Google’s recommendations of how to build front-end. Device agnostic, fast growing, open source, with stress put on performance and ease of development for multiple devices:
- Node + Ruby + Sass + Gulp build tooling by default, customizable
- built-in http server
- live browser reloading
- cross device synchronization with BrowserSync
Web Starter Kit is followed by Web Fundamentals - best practices in building HTML5 responsive web sites. These rules at some points sound a bit wishful, like using date/date-time input type fields. Other goes along existing trends, like choosing flexible multi-device layouts over fixed for making page ready for unusual screen dimensions on any device and any orientation. Still, these are pretty helpful guidelines build on top collective of experience.
Psst
Of course, there are quite a few great frameworks, not mentioning Yahoo’s minimalistic purecss, gumby, uikit, semantic-ui or AngularJs powered Ionic