BootStrap

 

What is Twitter Bootstrap?

Bootstrap is a sleek, intuitive, and powerful, mobile first front-end framework for faster and easier web development. It uses HTML, CSS and Javascript.

History

Bootstrap was developed by Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton at Twitter. It was released as an open source product in August 2011 on GitHub.

Why Use Bootstrap?

• Mobile first approach − Bootstrap 3, framework consists of Mobile first styles throughout the entire library instead them of in separate files.

• Browser Support − It is supported by all popular browsers.

• Easy to get started − With just the knowledge of HTML and CSS anyone can get started with Bootstrap. Also the Bootstrap official site has a good documentation.

• Responsive design − Bootstrap's responsive CSS adjusts to Desktops, Tablets and Mobiles. More about the responsive design is in the chapter Bootstrap Responsive Design.

• Provides a clean and uniform solution for building an interface for developers.

• It contains beautiful and functional built-in components which are easy to customize.

• It also provides web based customization.

• And best of all it is an open source.

What Bootstrap Package Includes?

• Scaffolding − Bootstrap provides a basic structure with Grid System, link styles, and background. This is is covered in detail in the section Bootstrap Basic Structure

• CSS − Bootstrap comes with the feature of global CSS settings, fundamental HTML elements styled and enhanced with extensible classes, and an advanced grid system. This is covered in detail in the section Bootstrap with CSS.

• Components − Bootstrap contains over a dozen reusable components built to provide iconography, dropdowns, navigation, alerts, pop-overs, and much more. This is covered in detail in the section Layout Components.

• JavaScript Plugins − Bootstrap contains over a dozen custom jQuery plugins. You can easily include them all, or one by one. This is covered in details in the section Bootstrap Plugins.

• Customize − You can customize Bootstrap's components, LESS variables, and jQuery plugins to get your very own version.

Bootstrap is a powerful toolkit - a collection of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript tools for creating and building web pages and web applications. It is a free and open source project, hosted on GitHub, and originally created by (and for) Twitter.

So, why learn Boostrap?

After its open source release in 2011, Bootstrap became popular very quickly, and not without reason. Web designers and web developers like Bootstrap because it is flexible and easy to work with. Its main advantages are that it is responsive by design, it maintains wide browser compatibility, it offers consistent design by using re-usable components, and it is very easy to use and quick to learn. It offers rich extensibility using JavaScript, coming with built-in support for jQuery plugins and a programmatic JavaScript API. Bootstrap can be used with any IDE or editor, and any server side technology and language, from ASP.NET to PHP to Ruby on Rails.

With Bootstrap, web developers can concentrate on the development work, without worrying about design, and get a good looking website up and running quickly. Conversely, it gives web designers a solid foundation for creating interesting Bootstrap themes.

Getting Started with Bootstrap Basics

Bootstrap is available in two forms; as a precompiled version, and as a source code version. The source code version uses the Less CSS preprocessor, but if you are more into Sass, there is an official Sass port of Bootstrap also available. To make it easier to make use of CSS vendor prefixes, Bootstrap uses Autoprefixer.

The source code version comes styles source code written in Less (or Sass), all the JavaScript, and accompanying documentation. This allows more ambitious designers and developers to change and customize, at their will, all the provided styles, and to build their own version of Bootstrap. But if you are not familiar with Less (or Sass), or you are just not interested in changing the source code, don’t worry. You can just use the precompiled vanilla CSS. All the styles can be overridden later by using custom styles.

File Structure

We’ll focus on the precompiled version, which can be downloaded here. When you download the zip archive and uncompress it, the basic file structure looks like this:

bootstrap/
├── css/
│   ├── bootstrap.css
│   ├── bootstrap.css.map
│   ├── bootstrap.min.css
│   ├── bootstrap-theme.css
│   ├── bootstrap-theme.css.map
│   └── bootstrap-theme.min.css
├── js/
│   ├── bootstrap.js
│   └── bootstrap.min.js
└── fonts/
    ├── glyphicons-halflings-regular.eot
    ├── glyphicons-halflings-regular.svg
    ├── glyphicons-halflings-regular.ttf
    ├── glyphicons-halflings-regular.woff
    └── glyphicons-halflings-regular.woff2

The Bootstrap structure is pretty simple and self-explanatory. It includes precompiled files that enable quick usage in any web project. Besides compiled and minified CSS and JS files, it also includes fonts from Glyphicons, and the optional starting Bootstrap theme.

This structure can be easily incorporated in your own project’s file structure by just including the Bootstrap files exactly as they come out of the zip archive, or if it suits your project better, you can rearrange these files and place them anywhere you like. Just be sure that the Glyphicons fonts folder is on the same level as the CSS folder.

Basic Bootstrap HTML Template

A basic Bootstrap HTML template should look something like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
    <title>Bootstrap Template</title>
    <link href="css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet">
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello, world!</h1>
    <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
    <script src="js/bootstrap.min.js"></script>
  </body>
</html>

It is important to start any HTML with a HTML 5 Doctype declaration, so that browsers know what kind of a document they can expect. The head contains three important <meta> tags that must be declared first, and any additional head tags must be added after these. If you want to support older browsers like IE8, you can also include HTML 5 shim in the head, which will enable use of HTML5 elements in older browsers, and Respond.js, that will polyfill CSS3 Media Queries, in the old versions of Internet Explorer.

<head>
  ...
  <!--[if lt IE 9]>
    <script src="https://oss.maxcdn.com/html5shiv/3.7.2/html5shiv.min.js"></script>
    <script src="https://oss.maxcdn.com/respond/1.4.2/respond.min.js"></script>
  <![endif]-->
</head>

Although, this is not very important if you are targeting only modern browsers.

JavaScript files are added to the end of the body to allow the web page to load visibly before any JavaScript is executed. jQuery is needed for Bootstrap plugins, and needs to load before bootstrap.js. If you aren’t using any of Bootstrap’s interactive features, you can also omit these files from the source.

This is the bare minimum that is needed to get a basic Bootstrap layout up and running. If you’re a developer, you’ll probably want to take a look at some more advanced examples at Bootstrap’s examples page. If you’re a designer, or just looking for inspiration, Bootstrap Expo showcases sites that are built using Bootstrap. As we’ll see later, every part of Bootstrap can be easily customized in CSS. But if that’s not your thing, and you are looking for a slightly different look and feel from the prepackaged Bootstrap themes, there are a lot of free, open source and premium themes available from sources like Bootswatch and WrapBootstrap.

Bootstrap Templates and UI Components

Bootstrap comes bundled with basic HTML and CSS design templates that include many common UI components. These include Typography, Tables, Forms, Buttons, Glyphicons, Dropdowns, Buttons and Input Groups, Navigation, Pagination, Labels and Badges, Alerts, Progress Bars, Modals, Tabs, Accordions, Carousels, and many others.