# HTML5 Starting boilerplate template
Today I want to go back to the absolute basics when we start our websites, the boilerplate template.
What a boilerplate stands for is a quick copy-paste `HTML` document that is the bare minimum to get started.
In this article, I'll share my version of the `HTML5` boilerplate with you guys and explain the parts that are to it.
## HTML5 Boilerplate template
Without further ado, this is my boilerplate
```html
Daily Dev Tips Boilerplate
```
You can also get the raw file directly from this GIST.
[Download the HTML5 boilerplate](https://gist.github.com/rebelchris/f13c5acc2c5a833042137540b63b7633)
## What is in this boilerplate
It's a very basic boilerplate, with only the bare minimum that would come back in 99% of the projects.
**Generic elements**
- Doctype: The doctype is very important as it tells a browser what kind of document it's looking at. In our case a basic HTML document
- The `` tag is the most important part and our main wrapper for everything. We define a `lang` attribute, in my version it's `en` (English).
**Head section**
We then come to the head section, which can be vastly extended, for me these are the basics that always recur.
- Meta charset, almost in all cases `UTF-8` is the character encoding we use, so I like to have it set to that.
- Title: What is our document called, this is the page title that shows in your tab
- Meta description: A short description of our page
- Meta Author: The name of the author, it's not a mandatory field, but I like to include this.
- Meta viewport, I tend to include these since they make sure your page behaves well on mobile. This one is the most generic one that will scale to the device size.
- Link to our stylesheet, in this case, the stylesheet is called style.css and sits in the css folder.
**Body section**
Then the main part where most of our content will go, the body of our HTML document.
- I've added an HTML comment where you can start your site's structure.
- Then I add the script as low as possible, it loads a script called main.js from the js folder.
That's it.
A very basic template, but something you'll need all the time.
You can even use tools to have this as a shortcut.
### Thank you for reading, and let's connect!
Thank you for reading my blog. Feel free to subscribe to my email newsletter and connect on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/DailyDevTipsBlog) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DailyDevTips1)