Google is expanding the reaches of Material Design with the release of Material Design Lite (MDL), a library of components that brings their attractive design guidelines to the web through vanilla CSS, HTML and JavaScript.

The goal of MDL is to make it easy to create a well-designed website that uses Google's Material Design. MDL has few dependencies, can be used with a wide variety of front-end tools, and clocks in at around 27 kB when gzipped.

The way Google has designed MDL allows components to be used individually, or as a group to create a full Material Design web layout. For example, you could use just the MDL graphing or tabbing code for your website, or could download a full-blown Material Design template for content-heavy websites such as blogs, dashboards and articles.

Google says that MDL is designed to work in "modern evergreen browsers" such as Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Microsoft Edge. Older, depreciated browsers such as Internet Explorer 9 are not fully supported, and will degrade to CSS-only layouts on MDL websites.

Developers and web designers can now download Material Design Lite either through Google's newly-setup website, or as source code through Github. The templates Google provides for MDL look very attractive, so hopefully some web developers out there will use this code for their own websites.