Bootstrap (front-end framework)
Free CSS framework for responsive, mobile-first web development.
Bootstrap, originally called Twitter Bootstrap, is a free, open-source CSS framework built for mobile-first, responsive web design. It offers HTML, CSS, and optional JavaScript templates for elements like typography, forms, buttons, and navigation. By May 2023, it ranked as the 17th most-starred project on GitHub and was used by 19.2% of all websites.
Quick Facts
- Author
- Mark Otto, Jacob Thornton
- Released
- 19 August 2011
- Programming language
- HTML
- CSS
- Less (v3)
- Sass (v4) and JavaScript
- Platform
- Web platform
- License
- MIT License (Apache License 2.0 prior to 3.1.0)
Facts from the source article.
Features
Bootstrap is an HTML, CSS, and JS library aimed at simplifying the development of informative web pages rather than web applications. Adding it to a project applies Bootstrap's choices of color, size, font, and layout. It provides basic style definitions for all HTML elements, ensuring uniform appearance for prose, tables, and form elements across browsers. Developers can use CSS classes to customize appearance, such as light- and dark-colored tables, page headings, pull quotes, and highlighted text. Bootstrap includes JavaScript components that do not require other libraries like jQuery, offering dialog boxes, tooltips, progress bars, navigation drop-downs, and carousels. Each component consists of an HTML structure, CSS declarations, and sometimes JavaScript code, and can extend existing interface elements like auto-complete for input fields. The most prominent components are layout components, starting with the "Container" element, which can be fixed-width or fluid-width. Fixed-width containers use one of five predefined widths depending on screen size: smaller than 576 pixels, 576–768, 768–992, 992–1200, 1200–1400, or larger than 1400 pixels. Other layout components implement CSS Flexbox layout through rows and columns. A precompiled version is available as one CSS file and three JavaScript files, while the raw modular form allows developers to remove unneeded components, apply themes, and modify uncompiled Sass files.
History
Bootstrap was originally named Twitter Blueprint and was developed by Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton at Twitter in 2010 to encourage consistency across internal tools. Before Bootstrap, various libraries caused inconsistencies and high maintenance. After a few months of development by a small group, many Twitter developers contributed during Hack Week, a hackathon-style week. It was renamed Twitter Bootstrap and released as an open-source project on August 19, 2011. It continued to be maintained by Otto, Thornton, a small core group, and a large community. On January 31, 2012, Bootstrap 2 was released, adding built-in support for Glyphicons, several new components, and responsive web design. Shortly before Bootstrap 2.1.2, Otto and Thornton left Twitter but committed to continue working on Bootstrap independently. Bootstrap 3 was released on August 19, 2013, with flat design, a mobile-first approach, a new plugin system with namespaced events, and dropped support for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.6. It was the first version released under the twbs organization on GitHub. Otto announced Bootstrap 4 on October 29, 2014; the first alpha was released on August 19, 2015, the first beta on August 10, 2017, and the final version on January 18, 2018. Significant changes included a major code rewrite, replacing Less with Sass, adding Reboot based on Normalize, dropping support for IE8, IE9, and iOS 6, adding CSS Flexible Box support, navigation customization, responsive spacing utilities, switching from pixels to root ems, increasing global font size from 14px to 16px, and dropping the panel, thumbnail, pager, well components, and Glyphicons icon font.
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