Bootstrap, originally named Twitter Blueprint, was developed by Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton at Twitter as a framework to encourage consistency across internal tools. Before Bootstrap, various libraries were used for interface development, which led to inconsistencies and a high maintenance burden. According to Twitter developer Mark Otto: After 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. It was renamed from Twitter Blueprint to Bootstrap, and released as an open source project on August 19, 2011. It has continued to be maintained by Mark Otto, Jacob Thornton, and a small group of core developers, as well as a large community of contributors.
Bootstrap 2 and 3
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. This version supports responsive web design, meaning the layout of web pages adjusts dynamically, taking into account the characteristics of the device used. The next major version, Bootstrap 3, was released on August 19, 2013. It redesigned components to use flat design and a mobile first approach.
Bootstrap 4
Mark Otto announced Bootstrap 4 on October 29, 2014. The first alpha version of Bootstrap 4 was released on August 19, 2015. The first beta version was released on 10 August 2017. Mark suspended work on Bootstrap 3 on September 6, 2016, to free up time to work on Bootstrap 4. Bootstrap 4 was finalized on January 18, 2018. Significant changes include:
Bootstrap 5 Alpha was officially released on 16 Jun 2020, although an experimental version of the package, created by Material Design for Bootstrap based on a developer version of the Alpha already surfaced the web weeks before. Version 5 Alpha is currently the latest version of the package. Major changes include:
Use cases: First use cases of Bootstrap 5 Alpha version appeared only days after the official premiere, the most prominent include:
MDB 5 - Material Design UI Kit for Bootstrap 5
Features
Bootstrap is a web framework that focuses on simplifying the development of informative web pages. 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. As such, the primary factor is whether the developers in charge find those choices to their liking. Once added to a project, Bootstrap provides basic style definitions for all HTML elements. The result is a uniform appearance for prose, tables and form elements across web browsers. In addition, developers can take advantage of CSS classes defined in Bootstrap to further customize the appearance of their contents. For example, Bootstrap has provisioned for light- and dark-colored tables, page headings, more prominent pull quotes, and text with a highlight. Bootstrap also comes with several JavaScript components in the form of jQuery plugins. They provide additional user interface elements such as dialog boxes, tooltips, and carousels. Each Bootstrap component consists of an HTML structure, CSS declarations, and in some cases accompanying JavaScript code. They also extend the functionality of some existing interface elements, including for example an auto-complete function for input fields. The most prominent components of Bootstrap are its layout components, as they affect an entire web page. The basic layout component is called "Container", as every other element in the page is placed in it. Developers can choose between a fixed-width container and a fluid-width container. While the latter always fills the width of the web page, the former uses one of the four predefined fixed widths, depending on the size of the screen showing the page:
Once a container is in place, other Bootstrap layout components implement a CSS Flexbox layout through defining rows and columns. A 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. The raw form of Bootstrap, however, enables developers to implement further customization and size optimizations. This raw form is modular, meaning that the developer can remove unneeded components, apply a theme and modify the uncompiled Sass files.
