This document compares Angular Material and Material Design Light (MDL), two libraries for implementing Google's Material Design specifications. Angular Material is designed for single-page Angular applications, while MDL is intended for static content websites. Both are open source and supported by Google. Key differences include Angular Material's use of directives and flexbox layouts versus MDL's use of HTML elements with classes and grid layouts. The document also provides brief histories of the libraries and examples of components in each.
2. History
Google I/O - Material design principles (June 2014)
Android 5.0 - First implementation of MD (November 2014)
Angular Material - Release v0.9.0´ (~April 2015)
Material Design Light - Release & open source v1.0.0 (July 2015)
3. Material design Light
Vanilla CSS, HTML and JavaScript
No dependencies
Framework-agnostic library
Lightweight (~27KB gzipped)
The MDL sources are written in Sass using BEM
Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Microsoft Edge, IE 10 +, IE 9 (CSS-only)
6. Use MDL on dynamic websites
<div id="container"/>
<script>
var button = document.createElement('button');
var textNode = document.createTextNode('Click Me!');
button.appendChild(textNode);
button.className = 'mdl-button mdl-js-button mdl-js-ripple-effect';
componentHandler.upgradeElement(button);
document.getElementById('container').appendChild(button);
</script>
7. Angular Material
Angular.js
Depends on angular, angular-animate and angular-aria.
Targeted for all browsers with versions current-1
Latest release: v1.0.0-rc4
14. Open source.
Supported by Google,
developed in collaboration
with the Material Design
team
Open source.
Supported by Google,
developed in collaboration
with Angular core team