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Released by Mark Otto (@mdo) and Jacob Thornton (@fat) to the world in August 2011, Twitter Bootstrap is a powerful framework that provides extremely high possibilities for customization and interactivity in websites. This mobile first framework is smooth, intuitive and super agile. It enables easier web development and offers a horde of tools useful for creating websites and web applications.
Seeing Bootstrap’s amazing features. many web developers have opted for it. To be precise, out of the top 1 million sites, around 28,784 sites utilize Twitter Bootstrap and the framework’s popularity is rising steadily. A framework like Bootstrap is the need of the hour owing to the demanding and highly interactive web environment.
So Why Is Everyone Raving About This Nifty Framework?
- Converging all the 3 key aspects of a UI, i.e. HTML, CSS and JS, Bootstrap provides a complete web development framework, which is not the case with other frameworks.
- With an extensive UI library for a wide-range of web applications like carousels, accordions and more, it provides stylish typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation and a lot more.
- Built with LESS framework, it uses the latest browser techniques and enables the everyday interface tasks developers come across with ease.
- Being a mobile first framework, it is cross browser and device compatible.
- It is available on github as an open source and provides HTML5 and CSS3 support.
Few of the Basic Bootstrap Features
- Scaffolding
Bootstrap provides two layout options along with a 12 column grid i.e. fluid layout and fixed layout. The fluid layout allows your website to use the entire width of the screen, whereas the fixed layout allows you to create a standard website that doesn’t use the entire width of the screen. For a fixed layout you may choose the 940px option for an example, or any other option that suits your website usage the best. Apart from the scaffolding feature, it also offers global styles for the body to reset type and background, link styles, grid system, and two simple layouts.
- Base CSS
Bootstrap provides fundamental HTML elements that are styled and enhanced with extensible classes to provide you with a wider range of options for website development.
- Components
With a huge no. of reusable components built to provide navigation, alerts, popovers and more, Bootstrap gives you tones of opportunities to engage website users with its wide scope for interactive and customized website development.
- JavaScript
Bootstrap features 13 custom jQuery plugins that bring its enormous selection of components to life. With tooltips, popovers, modals, alerts and more to look out for Bootstrap proves to be an ideal framework for developing websites with brilliant UI.
Which good sites are presently utilizing Bootstrap?
Bootstrap is recognized by many leading brands. Here’s an exhaustive list of sites using Bootstrap amazingly well.
When Can You Use Bootstrap?
Some usage scenarios:
- When you are building an app from scratch sans a visual designer, Bootstrap comes to your rescue
- If you have tight time frame for front-end development, Bootstrap’s agility can help speed things up
- When you want to define best-practices, processes and standards and set benchmarks within your front-end engineering team, Bootstrap can prove to be a great choice as majority of the techniques and strategies used in this framework are worth adopting for a team of front-end engineers
- If you have a thorough grip on the basics of CSS, markup and JS, Twitter Bootstrap with its set of well defined rules for HTML and CSS can enable you to do wonders with website development
For all those front-end engineers who wish to escalate their web-development a notch higher Bootstrap is an able companion. If you wish to know more about this amazing framework, its applicability, usage best practices and other aspects, view this infographic – “Twitter Bootstrap – It’s all About Stepping into the Right Boots!” by Webby Monks.
