Cross-posted from the Chromium Blog

By Paul Kinlan, Chrome Developer Relations

The web is a rich computing platform with unparalleled reach. In recent years, mobile devices have brought the web to billions of new users and introduced many new device capabilities, screen sizes, input methods, and more. To help developers navigate this brave new world, we built Web Fundamentals, a curated source for modern best practices. Today, we’re making it even easier to build multi-device experiences with the Beta release of the Web Starter Kit.

Web Fundamentals' guidelines are intended to be fundamental to the platform: useful no matter which framework you choose or which browser your users run. We have articles about responsive layouts, forms, touch, media, performance, device capabilities, and setting up a development workflow. Articles cover both coding and design. For example, the article on layout design patterns explains both the usability tradeoffs between different layout options and how to implement them. The performance section complements PageSpeed Insights, an auditing tool that encourages instant (<1 second) mobile web sites.

Designed to help you apply Web Fundamentals’ best practices in new projects, Web Starter Kit is a lightweight boilerplate with templates and tooling. Web Starter Kit gives you responsive layout, a visual style guide, and optional workflow features like performance optimization so you can keep your pages lean and fast.

Both Web Fundamentals and the Web Starter Kit are actively developed and curated by a team of developers from Google and several open-source contributors. Our source code is available on GitHub, and we welcome contributions and feedback. Looking ahead, we’ll be adding new content and working with the web development community to refine our advice. Please file an issue or submit a pull request to help us capture web development best practices.

We look forward to a more modern, multi-device web!

Posted by Paul Kinlan, Developer Advocate and Web Fundamentalist

Posted by Louis Gray, Googler

By Alex Komoroske, Product Manager

Cross-posted with the Chromium Blog

When you want to build something for the web, it's surprisingly difficult to find out how you can implement your vision across all browsers and operating systems. You often need to search across various websites and blogs to learn how certain technologies can be used. It's kind of like a scavenger hunt, except it's not any fun.

This scavenger hunt is soon coming to an end. Google along with the W3C and several leading internet and technology companies just announced the alpha release of Web Platform Docs. Web Platform Docs is a community-driven site that aims to become the comprehensive and authoritative source for web developer documentation.



The founding members of Web Platforms Docs have all already provided a lot of content for the site to help get this effort off to a strong start. However, collectively, we’ve barely scratched the surface. We decided that it would be better to open up Web Platform Docs to the community as early as possible, so that everyone – including you – can help expand and refine the documentation, and ultimately define the direction of the site.

If you have more questions about Web Platform Docs, you can find us on Twitter.


Alex Komoroske is a Product Manager on Chrome's Open Web Platform team. Before he was a product manager he was a web developer, and even today he loves building web apps in his spare time.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor