Roast of h5bp/html5-boilerplate

💀 The "Live, Laugh, Love" Sign of Web Development

Ah, HTML5 Boilerplate. The digital equivalent of a generic Ikea living room set that everyone bought in 2012 and refuses to throw away. It is the repo that says, "I want to build a website, but I’m terrified of npm run build."

Here is a savage breakdown of the repository that has been "helping" developers copy-paste code they don't understand for over a decade.

📂 The File Structure: A Hoarder's Paradise

The core philosophy of H5BP is "Delete what you don't need."
Spoiler Alert: You won't. You are going to deploy that site with every single one of these files because you have crippling F.O.M.O. about deleting a .gitattributes file you didn't know existed.

.htaccess: The absolute unit. This file is 500+ lines of Apache config wizardry that nobody reads. It’s strictly there so you can feel superior about Gzipping assets you haven't even created yet. You’re hosting this on Vercel or Netlify, Kyle; this file does literally nothing for you.
humans.txt: The most pretentious file in the history of open source. It’s a dedicated space for you to list the "Team" (you) and the "Thanks" (Stack Overflow), formatted like a credits sequence for a movie nobody watched.
tile.png / icon.png: Default placeholder icons that have ended up in production on more websites than I can count. Nothing says "Professional Web App" like a fav-icon that looks like a missing texture in a Source engine game.

👴 The Tech Stack: "Ok Boomer"

For years, this repo clung to jQuery and Modernizr like a castaway clinging to a volleyball. They finally removed them in recent versions, and now the repo is just... empty text files?

Congratulations, you have successfully engineered Notepad.

main.css: It imports normalize.css and then adds opinionated defaults that you will spend the next three hours overriding with !important.
main.js: A blank file. Groundbreaking. The sheer innovation here is staggering. It’s the "minimalism" of a landlord painting over a light switch.

🛠 The "Build" Process

They recently added npx create-html5-boilerplate because they realized that downloading a .zip file felt too much like downloading a cracked version of The Sims 2.

Now you can feel like a modern developer by running a CLI command that—wait for it—downloads the zip file for you. It’s the perfect tool for the developer who thinks Webpack is "black magic" but trusts a random Apache config from 2014 with their life.

📢 The Verdict

HTML5 Boilerplate is the Toyota Corolla of the internet. It’s reliable, it’s been around forever, and it’s incredibly boring. It is the perfect starting point for a portfolio site that hasn't been updated since you graduated from your bootcamp.

Star Rating: ⭐ (One star for every line of code in humans.txt that actually matters).