I love this, right down to the self-closing slash in the meta tag. 😉

Most of the time I’m building sites to run in my CMS, so I don’t completely start from scratch, but when I’m first building page templates from a provided design file, I begin with something very similar to this.

I’ve tried a few of the boilerplates that get a lot of attention these days, but too often there are bits I don’t need, and just as often, I simply disagree with certain elements of the approach.

I especially like keeping things simple in terms of handling IE8 and earlier, and I think you really nailed it.

Well done!