For a long time in the past, Google has provided developers with a series of tools that the company believes conform to contemporary best practices in web development. Today, Google went a step further and launched Web Starter Kit, a development platform similar to HTML5 Boilerplate, which includes templates and tools that can help developers quickly develop and run multi-screen applications.

Google stated that the performance and layout of these templates have been optimized to help developers quickly develop multi-device web experiences. This platform follows the advice Google previously provided to developers and turns that advice into actual code, enabling rapid application development through the necessary tools. It is worth noting that Web Starter Kit assumes by default that you have Node, Ruby, Ruby Sass, and Gulp.js installed on your system. Through the optional Gulp, developers will be able to use features such as LiveReload, automatic image optimization, and HTML minification.

In addition to the latest version of Chrome, Web Starter Kit also supports most other contemporary browsers, including IE10, IE11, Firefox 30, Firefox 31, and the most popular mobile browsers.

Although there is some overlap with projects such as Bootstrap and ZURB's Foundation, Google also helps Web Starter Kit users conveniently use styles from these projects.

Unlike these projects, Google does not provide many user interface elements and other components. It is currently unclear whether Google plans to add these elements later, but Google engineer Addy Osmani told Hacker News today that Web Starter Kit's purpose is not to compete with Bootstrap in terms of user interface elements. He also stated that libraries like Bootstrap and Foundation are "a good starting point for developing prototype applications," but the biggest challenge with using these libraries is that developers may continue to use these styles, looks, and experiences throughout the entire lifecycle of the application. Unlike these projects, Web Starter Kit encourages developers to modify the base styles to suit their own applications.

Similar to Bootstrap and Foundation, Web Starter Kit focuses on fluid grid layouts, but Google's solution is more flexible.

This Google project is still in testing. Somewhat surprisingly, Google released this tool one week before the I/O developer conference. However, Google may have wanted to give developers some time to familiarize themselves with the tool, and then hold a special workshop on the tool at the conference. (Translated by: Weijin)

Source: http://www.chinaz.com/start/2014/0620/356428.shtml