Google is bringing its popular Material Design UI introduced in Android Lollipop to static websites.
Material Design Lite (MDL), this week’s featured GitHub project, lets Web developers add a Material Design look and feel to static content websites. The Material Design implementation includes components of vanilla CSS, HTML and JavaScript, but doesn’t rely on any JavaScript frameworks or libraries.
MDL is optimized for cross-device use, progressive enhancement and “graceful degredation” in older browsers. The components can be used to construct Web pages and Web apps with consistent, functional design that adhere to modern Web design principles including browser portability and device independence. The implementation currently supports Android, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, mobile Safari and Internet Explorer 9, 10 and 11.
“Whilst there exist several community-driven options for Material Design, our experience has shown that there are several gaps in the Material specification when it comes to the web,” the MDL FAQ states. “Rather than guessing how these gaps should be filled (something we know the community has struggled with), we’ve opted for a close collaboration with the Material Design team to provide a Material library that is both spec compatible for today and provides guidance on aspects of the spec still being evolved.”
The open-source documentation includes a selection of templates for blogs, articles, text-heavy Web pages, dashboards and Android layouts, along with Material Design UI components and various styles with which to implement the design on a Web page or application.
Top 5 projects trending on GitHub this week
#1: MDL!
#2: Deepdream, another Google repository containing an IPython Notebook with sample code, complementing Google Research’s “Inceptionism” neural network art.
#3: Airbnb’s JavaScript Style Guide has been a rotating fixture in the GitHub Top 5 since way back in 2013.
#4: The Art of the Command Line first popped up on our list last month, and has stuck around ever since.
#5: ttystudio, a terminal-to-gif recorder minus the headaches.