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HTML5 Boilerplate homepage | Documentation table of contents

Extend and customize HTML5 Boilerplate

Here is some useful advice for how you can make your project with HTML5 Boilerplate even better. We don't want to include it all by default, as not everything fits with everyone's needs.

Server Configuration

We no longer include a .htaccess file for the Apache HTTP server in HTML5 Boilerplate by default, however if you are using a web server, then we encourage you to checkout out the server configuration that corresponds to your web server and environment.

These repos offer a collection of configuration snippets that can help your server improve the website's performance and security, while also ensuring that resources are served with the correct content-type and are accessible, if needed, even cross-domain.

App Stores

Smart App Banners in iOS 6+ Safari

Stop bothering everyone with gross modals advertising your entry in the App Store. Including the following meta tag will unobtrusively give the user the option to download your iOS app, or open it with some data about the user's current state on the website.

<meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=APP_ID,app-argument=SOME_TEXT">

DNS prefetching

In short, DNS Prefetching is a method of informing the browser of domain names referenced on a site so that the client can resolve the DNS for those hosts, cache them, and when it comes time to use them, have a faster turn around on the request.

Implicit prefetches

There is a lot of prefetching done for you automatically by the browser. When the browser encounters an anchor in your HTML that does not share the same domain name as the current location the browser requests, from the client OS, the IP address for this new domain. The client first checks its cache and then, lacking a cached copy, makes a request from a DNS server. These requests happen in the background and are not meant to block the rendering of the page.

The goal of this is that when the foreign IP address is finally needed it will already be in the client cache and will not block the loading of the foreign content. Fewer requests result in faster page load times. The perception of this is increased on a mobile platform where DNS latency can be greater.

Explicit prefetches

Typically the browser only scans the HTML for foreign domains. If you have resources that are outside of your HTML (a JavaScript request to a remote server or a CDN that hosts content that may not be present on every page of your site, for example) then you can queue up a domain name to be prefetched.

<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//example.com">
<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="https://ajax.googleapis.com">

You can use as many of these as you need, but it's best if they are all immediately after the Meta Charset element (which should go right at the top of the head), so the browser can act on them ASAP.

Further reading about DNS prefetching

Search

Direct search spiders to your sitemap

After creating a sitemap

Submit it to search engine tool:

  • Google
  • Bing
  • Yandex
  • Baidu OR Insert the following line anywhere in your robots.txt file, specifying the path to your sitemap:
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap_location.xml

Hide pages from search engines

According to Heather Champ, former community manager at Flickr, you should not allow search engines to index your "Contact Us" or "Complaints" page if you value your sanity. This is an HTML-centric way of achieving that.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

WARNING: DO NOT INCLUDE ON PAGES THAT SHOULD APPEAR IN SEARCH ENGINES.

Search Plugins

Sites with in-site search functionality should be strongly considered for a browser search plugin. A "search plugin" is an XML file which defines how your plugin behaves in the browser. How to make a browser search plugin.

<link rel="search" title="" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="">

Miscellaneous

News Feeds

RSS

Have an RSS feed? Link to it here. Want to learn how to write an RSS feed from scratch?

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="/rss.xml">

Atom

Atom is similar to RSS, and you might prefer to use it instead of or in addition to it. See what Atom's all about.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom" href="/atom.xml">

Pingbacks

Your server may be notified when another site links to yours. The href attribute should contain the location of your pingback service.

<link rel="pingback" href="">

Social Networks

Facebook Open Graph data

You can control the information that Facebook and others display when users share your site. Below are just the most basic data points you might need. For specific content types (including "website"), see Facebook's built-in Open Graph content templates. Take full advantage of Facebook's support for complex data and activity by following the Open Graph tutorial.

For a reference of Open Graph's markup and properties, you may check Facebook's Open Graph Protocol reference. Finally, you can validate your markup with the Facebook Object Debugger (needs registration to Facebook).

<meta property="fb:app_id" content="123456789">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.example.com/path/to/page.html">
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta property="og:title" content="">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://www.example.com/path/to/image.jpg">
<!-- Empty for decorative images. -->
<meta property="og:image:alt" content="Example image depicting...">
<meta property="og:description" content="">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="">
<meta property="article:author" content="">

Twitter Cards

Twitter provides a snippet specification that serves a similar purpose to Open Graph. In fact, Twitter will use Open Graph when Cards is not available. You can read more about the various snippet formats in the official Twitter Cards documentation.

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@site_account">
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@individual_account">
<meta name="twitter:url" content="https://www.example.com/path/to/page.html">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="">
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://www.example.com/path/to/image.jpg">

Schema.org

Google also provides a snippet specification that serves a similar purpose to Facebook's Open Graph or Twitter Cards. This metadata is a subset of schema.org's microdata vocabulary, which covers many other schemas that can describe the content of your pages to search engines. For this reason, this metadata is more generic for SEO, notably for Google's search-engine, although this vocabulary is also used by Microsoft, Pinterest and Yandex.

You can validate your markup with the Structured Data Testing Tool. Also, please note that this markup requires to add attributes to your top html tag.

<html class="no-js" lang="" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Article">
  <head>

    <link rel="author" href="">
    <link rel="publisher" href="">
    <meta itemprop="name" content="">
    <meta itemprop="description" content="">
    <meta itemprop="image" content="">

URLs

Canonical URL

Signal to search engines and others "Use this URL for this page!" Useful when parameters after a # or ? is used to control the display state of a page. https://www.example.com/cart.html?shopping-cart-open=true can be indexed as the cleaner, more accurate https://www.example.com/cart.html.

<link rel="canonical" href="">

Web Apps

There are a couple of meta tags that provide information about a web app when added to the Home Screen on iOS:

  • Adding apple-mobile-web-app-capable will make your web app chrome-less and provide the default iOS app view. You can control the color scheme of the default view by adding apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style.
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style" content="black">
  • You can use apple-mobile-web-app-title to add a specific sites name for the Home Screen icon.
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-title" content="">

For further information please read the official documentation on Apple's site.

Apple Touch Icons

Apple touch icons are used as icons when a user adds your webapp to the home screen of an iOS devices.

Though the dimensions of the icon can vary between iOS devices and versions one 180×180px touch icon named icon.png and including the following in the <head> of the page is enough:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="icon.png">

For a more comprehensive overview, please refer to Mathias' article on Touch Icons.

Apple Touch Startup Image

Apart from that it is possible to add start-up screens for web apps on iOS. This basically works by defining apple-touch-startup-image with an according link to the image. Since iOS devices have different screen resolutions it maybe necessary to add media queries to detect which image to load. Here is an example for an iPhone:

<link rel="apple-touch-startup-image" media="(max-device-width: 480px) and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2)" href="img/startup.png">

Theme Color

You can add the theme-color meta extension in the <head> of your pages to suggest the color that browsers and OSes should use if they customize the display of individual pages in their UIs with varying colors.

<meta name="theme-color" content="#ff69b4">

The content attribute extension can take any valid CSS color.

For browser support details, refer to Can I Use.

security.txt

When security risks in web services are discovered by users they often lack the channels to disclose them properly. As a result, security issues may be left unreported.

Security.txt defines a standard to help organizations define the process for users to disclose security vulnerabilities securely. Include a text file on your server at .well-known/security.txt with the relevant contact details.

Check https://securitytxt.org/ for more details.