Good question. We don't consider ourselves a Bootstrap competitor, but rather a combination of best practices and tooling when it comes to starting work on new multi-device/mobile web projects.

Bootstrap, Zurb and similar libraries provide a great start for prototyping your apps, but one of the biggest challenges with them is that it’s (almost too) easy to get stuck using their styles, look and feel for the lifetime of your application. We think this leads to a poorer experience. It's also easy to just end up with 100KB+ of styles (unless you're opting for a modular build) that never get removed.

In Web Starter Kit, we provide you a boilerplate set of base styles and a visual style guide for your components, but we actively encourage you to change these to suit your own app. This may require a little more work, but the reality is that any serious project is going to have it’s own look and feel and we want you to feel comfortable changing the kit to suit your own needs.

We also include tooling for removing unused CSS. So, even if you use our styles (or choose to use Bootstrap instead) we should hopefully help keep your pages lean.

"it’s (almost too) easy to get stuck using their styles, look and feel for the lifetime of your application"

I'm a developer, and I've never used Bootstrap in my life, but my favorite aspect of Bootstrap is how it brings a sense of familiarity to the web. Why does every website need a unique look and feel? I'd rather not learn a new navigation or layout a hundred times each day. The internet is primarily about content, and Google should know that more than anyone. However, everyone tries to reinvent the wheel, and when I come across a Bootstrap site, it's somewhat comforting.

Don't get me wrong, creativity is important to some sites, and others are required to go outside of the box to reach their goals. However, they're the minority.

Same. Native applications use relatively standard controls, look, and feel across an OS; why should web applications be different?

Is there any way to use the tooling independently of web starter kit? Wasn't able to find a link on the site, are they just warnings you see once you start developing? Can the tooling account for JS changes and navigation between pages?

Sorry for the barrage of questions, just really hoping to find a decent tool to clean up CSS...

If it's just cleaning up CSS you're after, I would use UnCSS. Checkout grunt-uncss task or gulp-uncss to hook it up to your build process. We don't currently document using the tooling independent of the kit, but you should be able to pluck the package.json and gulpfile.js and edit per your needs. We'll try to get this documented.

I'm curious about the cross device synchronization.

Can you provide further details on this and how it's useful when web apps can not keep devices awake (i.e. iOS8).

You can read more about the device sync solution BrowserSync here: http://browsersync.io/

As for keeping devices awake, that was actually recently discussed at specifiction: http://discourse.specifiction.org/t/allow-developers-to-cont...

We (speakerblast) created a wake lock solution that works in iOS6 & iOS7, as our web app syncs audio across devices.

In iOS8 as of now audio playback in Safari stops when the devices sleeps and or when the user exits Safari. This is not how it was previously, rather audio played in the background and audio playback kept the device in a semi wake stage.

Were hoping this is a bug they'll fix before the final and not the new way forward.

More like html5boilerplate alternative.

I think this is a fair comparison. Right now we are not providing components like the ones you get in Zurb and Bootstrap.

EDIT: clarified.

It seems like this is more of a workflow than just a framework. Zurb and bootstrap don't come with build tools as far as I know, whereas this includes a gulpfile and a bunch of other stuff that's very common in my workflow. This feels more yeoman-esque + generator to me.

Edit: Totally posted this before I read 'Web Starter Kit is inspired by Mobile HTML5 Boilerplate and Yeoman's generator-gulp-webapp, having taken input from contributors to both projects during development. Our FAQs attempt to answer commonly asked questions about the project.'

Yeah. that is a very good summary. If you want build process and tooling to help then we have that based on the tools that we think are the best, however we don't force workflow on people if they don't want it.

Noticed Paul Irish is no longer active on H5BP, is he now on team Web Starter Kit or working on the broader Web Fundamentals?

Paul Irish has given us guidance, input and feedback and is on the same team as me, but Addy Osmani is the main driver of starter kit, with me leading Web Fundamentals.

Thanks for the insight. Given his broader influence and role at Google it made sense he was involved in some way.

Definitely more Bootstrap than H5BP. H5BP is just an index.html with some reset CSS and Modernizr. This is much more.

More like Yeoman competition.