Bootstrap is Twitter's toolkit for kickstarting CSS for websites, apps, and more. It includes base CSS styles for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, alerts, and more. Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript for popular user interface components and interactions. A brief history
In the earlier days of Twitter, engineers used almost any library they were familiar with to m
eet front-end requirements. Inconsistencies among the individual applications made it difficult to scale and maintain them. Bootstrap began as an answer to these challenges and quickly accelerated during Twitter’s first Hackweek. By the end of Hackweek, we had reached a stable version that engineers could use across the company. With the help and feedback of many engineers, Bootstrap has grown significantly to encompass not only basic styles, but more elegant and durable front-end design patterns. This release represents our first public 1.0 release and the open sourcing of many months of hard work. At its core, Bootstrap is just CSS, but it's built with Less, a flexible pre-processor that offers much more power and flexibility than regular CSS. With Less, we gain a range of features like nested declarations, variables, mixins, operations, and color functions. Additionally, since Bootstrap is purely CSS when compiled via Less, we gain two important benefits:
First, Bootstrap remains very easy to implement; just drop it in your code and go. Compiling Less can be accomplished via Javascript, an unofficial Mac application, or via Node.js (read more about this at http://lesscss.org). Second, once complied, Bootstrap contains nothing but CSS, meaning there are no superfluous images, Flash, or Javascript. All that remains is simple and powerful CSS for your web development needs.
