What Is Bootstrap: A Beginner’s Guide to Bootstrap

Bootstrap (formerly Twitter Bootstrap) is a free and open-source CSS framework directed at responsive, mobile-first front-end web development. It contains HTML, CSS and (optionally) JavaScript-based design templates for typography, forms, buttons, navigation, and other interface components. This Bootstrap framework helps rapid web development and supports developers in creating responsive web pages. Twitter Blueprint was the first name for Bootstrap and was developed on Twitter by Mr. Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton. It was released as an open-source product on GitHub in August 2011. The framework is primarily built to encourage design uniformity and reliability of web pages across applications.

If you’ve been considering front-end engineering as a career option, then you’ve likely heard about Bootstrap and its multiple versions. Initially released in 2011 by Twitter developers Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton, Bootstrap has become one of the most popular CSS frameworks. One of the main benefits of development frameworks like Bootstrap is that they can help speed up development times, while maintaining quality and consistency across the site. And you don’t need to spend hours trying to get everything looking and working right across browsers, platforms, and devices. By using Bootstrap, all (most) of the hard work is done for you.

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Before its existence, developers used various external libraries to perform responsive web development, leading to incompatibilities in web development and heavy maintenance burdens. Bootstrap is a free and open-source tool collection for creating responsive websites and web applications. It is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for developing responsive, mobile-first websites.

Introduction to Bootstrap

Bootstrap is promoted as being One framework, every device. This is because websites built with Bootstrap will automatically scale between devices — whether the device is a mobile phone, tablet, laptop, desktop computer, screen reader, etc. As the web evolves more and more toward responsive design, it can be a real challenge for web developers to keep up. Bootstrap enables you to create responsive websites without you needing to do the «responsive» bit. Curious which components explicitly require jQuery, our JS, and Popper.js?

JavaScript

Responsive websites are pages that easily adapt to different devices, platforms, and screen sizes. Bootstrap can be used to build websites of any scale, from small blogs to large corporate websites. Organizations that use Bootstrap include NASA, University of Washington, FIFA, Newsweek, VOGUE and many more. Also, athough Bootstrap comes with its own set of styles, these are easy to override. You are free to use whichever Bootstrap components you choose, while adding your own on top.

Introduction to Bootstrap

This ensures padding does not affect the final computed width of an element, but it can cause problems with some third party software like Google Maps and Google Custom Search Engine. You can see an example of this in action in the starter template. Without it, you’ll see some funky incomplete styling, but including it shouldn’t cause any considerable hiccups. Cloning a site can help you familiarize yourself with web development and design. HTML lies at the heart of web development and forms the structure of our favorite websites. Bootstrap is a valuable skill to have as a Front-End Engineer.

CSS

Bootstrap is an HTML, CSS and JS library that focuses on simplifying the development of informative web pages (as opposed to web applications). The primary purpose of adding it to a web project what is bootstrap is to apply Bootstrap’s choices of color, size, font and layout to that project. As such, the primary factor is whether the developers in charge find those choices to their liking.

Introduction to Bootstrap

We know that’s a mouthful, so let’s go through the parts of that definition one by one. Bootstrap is an open-source and free CSS framework that helps in directing a responsive device-friendly mobile-first front-end webpage development tool. This tutorial series will teach you about Bootstrap and its various features. Given Bootstrap is the most popular frontend development framework on the web, this skillset could be a useful one to learn.

Responsive meta tag

This raw form is modular, meaning that the developer can remove unneeded components, apply a theme and modify the uncompiled Sass files. While Bootstrap lets you easily build responsive sites, it’s not necessarily the most efficient option. In fact, Bootstrap websites are known to be resource-intensive, which means longer loading times and battery drain for anyone visiting your site. Open-source products are great, but what happens when you have a problem? Luckily, Bootstrap comes with comprehensive documentation, so it’s easy to look up how each bit of code works in detail. The documentation even includes samples of code, making it easier for beginners to pick up Bootstrap.

Introduction to Bootstrap

Adding Bootstrap to your bag of tricks could help you in many ways — from building websites faster, to landing your dream job. This means that it is primarily designed for mobile devices, then scales up from there (as opposed to being designed for desktop, then trying to scale it down to mobile devices). Many of our components require the use of JavaScript to function. Specifically, they require jQuery, Popper.js, and our own JavaScript plugins.

Where to Get Bootstrap?

Bootstrap is a powerful tool that lets you quickly build attractive websites that look great on desktops, phones, and tablets. While there are some definite disadvantages to Bootstrap, in many cases, the benefits of website responsiveness, wide compatibility, and saved time will outweigh the cons. You can even eliminate the biggest drawbacks with a bit of extra time and effort. Bootstrap saves developers time so that they can focus on other things rather than coding CSS. Bootstrap is an open-source framework used for creating responsive, mobile-first sites.

Bootstrap is developed mobile first, a strategy in which we optimize code for mobile devices first and then scale up components as necessary using CSS media queries. To ensure proper rendering and touch zooming for all devices, add the responsive viewport meta tag to your . Get started with Bootstrap, the world’s most popular framework for building responsive, mobile-first sites, with jsDelivr and a template starter page.

If you decide to go with the separate scripts solution, Popper.js must come first, and then our JavaScript plugins. Using a package manager or need to download the source files? Use jsDelivr, provided for free by the folks at jsDelivr.

  • Bootstrap can be used to build websites of any scale, from small blogs to large corporate websites.
  • The result is a uniform appearance for prose, tables and form elements across web browsers.
  • Given Bootstrap is the most popular frontend development framework on the web, this skillset could be a useful one to learn.
  • For more straightforward sizing in CSS, we switch the global box-sizing value from content-box to border-box.