



This version supports responsive web design, meaning the layout of web pages adjusts dynamically, taking into account the characteristics of the device used (whether desktop, tablet, mobile phone). On January 31, 2012, Bootstrap 2 was released, which added built-in support for Glyphicons, several new components, as well as changes to many of the existing components. It has continued to be maintained by Otto, Thornton, a small group of core developers, and a large community of contributors. It was renamed from Twitter Blueprint to Bootstrap and released as an open-source project on August 19, 2011. Īfter a few months of development by a small group, many developers at Twitter began to contribute to the project as a part of Hack Week, a hackathon-style week for the Twitter development team. Months later, we ended up with an early version of Bootstrap as a way to document and share common design patterns and assets within the company. Through that process, we saw ourselves build something much more substantial than another internal tool. According to Otto:Ī super small group of developers and I got together to design and build a new internal tool and saw an opportunity to do something more. Before Bootstrap, various libraries were used for interface development, which led to inconsistencies and a high maintenance burden. History Early beginnings īootstrap, originally named Twitter Blueprint, was developed by Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton at Twitter as a framework to encourage consistency across internal tools. This raw form is modular, meaning that the developer can remove unneeded components, apply a theme and modify the uncompiled Sass files. The raw form of Bootstrap, however, enables developers to implement further customization and size optimizations. Once a container is in place, other Bootstrap layout components implement a CSS Flexbox layout through defining rows and columns.Ī precompiled version of Bootstrap is available in the form of one CSS file and three JavaScript files that can be readily added to any project. While the latter always fills the width of the web page, the former uses one of the five predefined fixed widths, depending on the size of the screen showing the page: Developers can choose between a fixed-width container and a fluid-width container. The basic layout component is called "Container", as every other element in the page is placed in it. The most prominent components of Bootstrap are its layout components, as they affect an entire web page. They also extend the functionality of some existing interface elements, including for example an auto-complete function for input fields.Įxample of a webpage using Bootstrap framework rendered in Firefox Each Bootstrap component consists of an HTML structure, CSS declarations, and in some cases accompanying JavaScript code. They provide additional user interface elements such as dialog boxes, tooltips, progress bars, navigation drop-downs, and carousels. For example, Bootstrap has provisioned for light- and dark-colored tables, page headings, more prominent pull quotes, and text with a highlight.īootstrap also comes with several JavaScript components which do not require other libraries like jQuery. In addition, developers can take advantage of CSS classes defined in Bootstrap to further customize the appearance of their contents. The result is a uniform appearance for prose, tables and form elements across web browsers. Once added to a project, Bootstrap provides basic style definitions for all HTML elements. As such, the primary factor is whether the developers in charge find those choices to their liking. The primary purpose of adding it to a web project is to apply Bootstrap's choices of color, size, font and layout to that project. Bootstrap is an HTML, CSS & JS Library that focuses on simplifying the development of informative web pages (as opposed to web apps).
