A year after releasing Material Design, Google announced on Monday that it is releasing Material Design Lite (MDL), a web design program intended to work on websites at large and not just mobile operating system devices.
SiliconANGLE.com reports that Google’s new release can be used in conjuction with CSS, JavaScript, HTML, and other web design components designers and developers typically use. Unlike the original Material Design, which only applied to designing mobile apps on Android, iOS, and web app systems, MDL can work for any kind of app and website.
MDL-created web design features the latest in web design standards such as browser portability, device independence, and degradation. In addition, they will be compatible with many prominent web browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Microsoft Edge, and Safari as well as less prominent, antiquated ones like IE9, which only accepts CSS code.
MDL comes with a component library of several user interface (UI) controls such as buttons, checkboxes, text fields, cards, column layouts, sliders, spinners, tabs, and typography.
The program also comes with a feature considered critical in today’s standards: responsive layout. That is, the computer will automatically configure to the device’s screen size. This feature is becoming more common, considering that webpages are increasingly accessed by mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
Google claims the program is ideal for websites with a lot of content such as blogs, marketing pages, and text articles. Although MDL already comes with an impressive array of components, users are allowed to add components to existing frameworks.
Developers who would like to “fork” MDL sources will be allowed to do so, according to Google. The company also maintains that MDL has few dependencies, which makes it easy to install and use. As a .zip file, MDL is only 27KB.
Web design is considered incredibly important in business nowadays. In 2011, for example, a whopping $1.1 trillion in sales were influenced by the Internet.
