> This is the first time I've heard of Mobile Boilerplate. Can you provide > some background info? Specifically I am wondering, why desktop/mobile are > separate rather than combined into one download? What is the suggested > implementation of a site with both desktop & mobile versions?
HTML5Boilerplate is the one you should use if you are getting started on websites. It is optimized to work and adapt on mobile browsers.
Mobile HTML5 Boilerplate is optimized for web apps that are explicitly written to have different UX while on devices other than the desktop. * This means they might want to imitate the UI of native applications or be close to it. * They may make heavy use of touch-based UI paradigms and other interactions that are not possible on a desktop browser. * They explictly use media queries and other ways to detect a non-desktop browser and serve an experience that is different.
When I say web apps, I mean websites that are used intensively to accomplish certain tasks (like twitter.com / gmail.com / facebook.com / admin interface of wordpress.com ). These sites are required to take advantage of the space available and help users accomplish their tasks with minimal effort no matter what device.
On the other hand, we do have websites that users visit occasionally because they found it on some friend's email or on reddit which has content but users rarely interact with it (other than just visiting it or at most leaving a comment), in which case html5 boilerplate would be a good template to use. This would be a good option for most sites that are content-rich and require minimal user interaction.
Unfortunately for us, mobile platforms are also creating silos by specifying custom meta tags to use to optimize for their platform. E.g. Apple recommends using apple-touch-icon meta tag to specify things specific to webkit mobile browsers. Nokia has its own. We did not want html5boilerplate to add such cruft to the defaults, but this would be necessary for someone writing an application tailored to take advantage of non-desktop devices. There is already a lot of consistency, but we wish there was more standardization of mobile optimizations.
Please do contribute suggestions for improving the mobile boilerplate here: https://github.com/shichuan/mobile-html5-boilerplate/issues