Material Design Lite (MDL) is a front-end library that implements Google's Material Design in vanilla CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. It provides a collection of reusable UI components such as buttons, cards, text fields, sliders, and layout systems, all styled with BEM-like class names (e.g., `mdl-button`, `mdl-js-button`). The library is designed to be lightweight and dependency-free, with components enhanced via a central `componentHandler` that upgrades static DOM elements with interactive behavior. The project is in maintenance mode; active development has shifted to Material Components for the web (MDC Web). The codebase follows a consistent component pattern: each component defines a JavaScript class with `init()`, `CssClasses_`, and `Constant_` properties, and registers itself with the global `componentHandler`. The ripple effect is a standalone component reused by many other components. Although the library is stable and functionally complete, the codebase shows significant technical drift: it uses prototypal inheritance, Gulp 3, Babel presets for ES2015, and lacks modern module bundling (ES modules, webpack). The documentation site is self-hosted and uses Jekyll, but the hosted version is retired. Templates in `templates/` provide full-page examples (blog, portfolio, dashboard) for quick prototyping.