One of the meanings of word “Bootstrap” means starting up with minimal resources. In technology, term “Bootstrap” refers to a front-end web framework, which needs minimal work to get your website ready. It provides basic structure in the form of HTML and CSS based design templates, forms, buttons, and other web components. With the use of provided libraries, one can set up her website pretty quickly.
What does Bootstrap provide?
Default configuration provides a grid system made of 12 columns. A developer can choose how does she want to arrange the data amongst these 12 columns. She can choose to have only 2 column structure each column spanning 6 cells or she can also choose to have the first column as 4 cells and second as 8 cells. Each row could have a different structure as per the need of the design.
Bootstrap provides easy-to-use classes to support grid structure mentioned above. It also provides easy-to-use classes for standard HTML components such as buttons, lists, tables etc. Standard look-n-feel for messages (alert, error, warning, notice etc) is also added to the framework.
Additionally, it also provides jQuery which is used by the framework for standard validations, event handling, and other several things.
What are the advantages of Bootstrap?
Following are few of the several advantages of using Bootstrap framework for your website:
- Responsive – websites built using this framework can adapt to the device size and can easily rearrange the components (hide, resize) as per the form factor of the device. In fact, the latest version of Bootstrap has been built with “mobile-first” philosophy. It helps a lot in the design of modern web and mobile-web applications.
- Faster Speed Of Development – Given the availability of ready-made classes and components, one can quickly develop the website using this framework.
- Customizability – You can also customize certain sections of the website by overriding the CSS classes.
- Community Support – This is one of the frameworks which has huge community support – active GitHub project, several forks and several contributors. This is in addition to thousands of articles explaining how to use this framework.
The only disadvantage I came across about Bootstrap was – all the websites that use only basic Bootstrap, look alike! But this is something easy to overcome by customizing the website to a certain extent.
Any alternatives to Bootstrap?
Ample of them. Foundation, Skeleton, Pure.CSS, HTML5 Boilerplate and many more.
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Related Words
Web Framework, Responsive Web Design, Javascript, CSS, jQuery,
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