I'd advocate most people avoid this if their intention is to write an app. As an alternative, I'd suggest evaluating create-react-app [0] or preact-cli [1] if you're looking for something lighter. The lack of testing setup and module support in this kit feels like a regression, although I'll concede that it really depends on your use-case.<p>I've been using webpack [2] for a few years and wouldn't willingly go back to this style of writing web apps. Once you learn how to use it, the world is your oyster. You can write a loader or plugin to achieve pretty much any kind of requirement that comes your way.<p>Consider replacing sass with cssnext [3], or even directly using postcss along with the few plugins you need. As an example, you can use native css variables during development and compile em away for production. Another great addition is the :matches selector, which makes for much cleaner selectors in certain cases. I never really found much value in most other sass features.<p>Instead of running imagemin as part of your build process, consider installing imagemin-cli [4] and applying optimizations before checking in images. That way it only has to done once, regardless of how many times someone checks-out your repo.<p>Even if you enable ES2015 compilation with babel, you don't get any polyfills. That means trying to use standard ES2015 globals like Map, Set, or Promise will not work on older browsers. If you're gonna tell people they can add ES2015 support by changing a single line, it would seem prudent to mention this gotcha.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/developit/preact-cli" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/developit/preact-cli</a><p>[2] <a href="https://webpack.js.org" rel="nofollow">https://webpack.js.org</a><p>[3] <a href="http://cssnext.io" rel="nofollow">http://cssnext.io</a><p>[4] <a href="https://github.com/imagemin/imagemin-cli" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/imagemin/imagemin-cli</a>
> Powered by Material Design Lite<p>That's a curious choice. MDL isn't being developed further and is being replaced by <i>"Material Components for the web"</i> <a href="https://github.com/material-components/material-components-web" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...</a><p>From <a href="https://github.com/google/material-design-lite" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/google/material-design-lite</a>:<p><pre><code> Limited support
Material Design Lite is now in limited support, with development having moved to the Material Components for the web repository.
No further development is taking place in MDL by the core team, but we are happy to review PRs, fix critical bugs and push out new releases. No breaking changes will be accepted.</code></pre>
Am I missing something? This thing came out like three years ago. If this is news: EVERYONE, CHECK OUT THIS AMAZING THING CALLED BOOTSTRAP!!1!<p><i>scnr</i>
An opinionated Web Starter Kit with no libraries or frameworks included? What is Google's opinion on which way to build a web application, roll your own?
Nobody new to web is going to understand this stuff and people who would really understand this advice could already give it themselves. Not sure who the target audience for this is supposed to be but why do we need yet-another-web-boilerplate
I'm glad to see they are using gulp. I know webpack is the hot new technology, but in my limited experience with webpack, gulp is easier to use and is more intuitive. Webpack has a lot of loaders, but I feel like gulp gives more flexibility out of the box. When I want to do something with gulp that I don't know how to do, I feel like it is easier to implement with gulp, because gulp seems to be a bit lower level. I noticed that they updated the docs for webpack since I last visited, so maybe I will try again.
> <i>.gitignore: node_modules</i><p>Wait, did I miss something? Wasn't it google who started the "vendor everything" philosophy in the first place?