When comparing HTML5 Boilerplate vs UiKit, the Slant community recommends UiKit for most people. In the question“What are the best Bootstrap alternatives?” UiKit is ranked 4th while HTML5 Boilerplate is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose UiKit is:
The code is pretty clean and follows well-defined conventions.
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Pros
Pro Includes a comprehensive set of server configuration files
These configuration files may help increase performance of the webapp.
Pro Includes Modernizr
Modernizr checks browser support for HTML5, CSS3, as well as a few other miscellaneous elements and allows for easily writing fallbacks if they're not supported.
Pro Documented and undocumented versions
To help out newcommers to either programming in general or HTML5 Boilerplate specifically, the boilerplate includes in-depth docs that help understand how things work and why certain choices are made. The documentation is highly comprehensive going even as far as to describe every single line of normalize.css that the H5BP includes.
Pro Cross-browser normalization
H5BP includes normalize.css that will help fix inconsistencies in the way browsers render elements.
Pro Performance optimizations
HTML5 Boilerplate theme doesn't only provide a base template for building your next modern site. It also has performance optimization features built into it which include stuff like html + js minification , image size reduction as well as css minification. This link here describes how to optimize your shiny new html5 site using these built in features.
Pro Optional support for XHR and Flash
With optional support for XHR, we can use techniques such as XHR eval and XHR injections to optimize the loading of external scripts and significantly reduce page load times. Alongside XHR, built-in support for Flash means that you can use your old swf/flash content on your website, where you feel you're not ready for HTML5 yet.
Pro Well architected
The code is pretty clean and follows well-defined conventions.
Pro Ready to use themes available
There are plenty of ready to use themes available from the official website. You can choose the theme that you want to use from the dropdown menu and then download the CSS, LESS or SASS file for that theme to use for the website.
Pro Easy to use.
When using UIKit classes, it is used with the ui- prefix which is very good. Components are explained straight-forward.
Pro Built-in animation capabilities
UiKit has some built-in animation features which can be used to animate various components.
Pro Great style even out of the box
UiKit has a pretty good and clean style even out of the box without any customization needed.
Pro Very customizable
UiKit's rather minimal style can be easily customizable to create an entirely new look to fit the needs of the designer.
Pro Extremely modular
Every aspect of the framework is designed to be modular, this way designers can easily choose which components to add to their stylesheet without risking to damage the overall style.
Cons
Con Not a complete solution
HTML5 Boilerplate is basically just that, a template or a basis on which to build an HTML page. It doesn't have much mark up or components out of the box. In other words, it doesn't provide all the components and tools needed to build a UI, it contains best practices and a generall template on which to build your UI.
Con Messy code classes
Nested classes become complicated to read to obtain desired result.
Con Not very popular
UiKit is not a very popular framework, especially compared to other options. As such it may be hard to find learning resources other than the official documentation or it may be more likely for development of UiKit to be dropped than for another more popular framework
Con Slow development
New features and updates trickle out over 6-12 month development cycles, bug fixes are more frequent but very slow and selective as well.
Con Pre-built starter templates are now behind a paywall
Easier to use Joomla! or Wordpress starter templates without paying money for it.
Con Closed development
Development is mostly done in-house and not publicly available.