Explain like I only speak in plain English

Bootstrap is a CSS framework that lets front-end web engineers add style structure to websites very quickly. Bootstrap provides a set of standards in spacing, typography, color, interactive behaviors, and more.

Its most prominent feature is the responsive grid structure. Allowing engineers to divide and position HTML content in columns for different viewing devices with ease.

If CSS is make up for websites, then CSS framework such as Bootstrap is like a brand of make up products. It comes with an array of tools and standards to help you layout and dress up websites very quickly.

Explain like I'm a total nerd

Bootstrap started as an internal initiative at Twitter to standardize design patterns across departments. Bootstrap was released as an open source project in 2011. It is the second most liked project on GitHub with over 125,000 stars.

15% of the top 100 thousand most visited websites are built with Bootstrap. The latest version, Bootstrap 4, was released on 19 Jan, 2018. A total of 17,483 commits were created by 1,005 contributors up to this point.

After adding Bootstrap to your project, you can use its styling standards by adding Bootstrap specific classes to your HTML elements. Bootstrap comes with standards for layout, typography, forms, buttons, navigation, media, and more. To use its grid structure, you need to follow its grid hierarchy of container > row > columns.

Explain like I'm an artist

Using Bootstrap in a website project is like using French curve and template ruler when you are drawing. It helps you quickly add standardised features to your project.

Explain like I like examples

The following boxes are created using Bootstrap 4's grid structure. Using Bootstrap `col-*` classes, we can define the width each element should take up per row.

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2 of 2

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Explain like I already know it

Bootstrap made the switch to use CSS flexbox for its grid structure in version 4. Which allows for fluid grid layouts while still supporting fixed grid. It also switched to Sass in favor of Less.

Due to its use of flexbox, Bootstrap 4 won't support IE9 and earlier Internet Explorer browsers. It also has some gotchas on iOS10 and prior versions.

Apart from Bootstrap, other note worthy CSS frameworks include Foundation "27k stars", Bulma "27k stars", and Semantic UI "41k stars".

CSS

CSS is like make up for a website. CSS allows you to specify the exact styling at the exact place on your website, so you can make it look the way you want it. You can specify the positions, sizes, spacing, color, backgrounds, font styles of any content.

Library

In programming, a library is a collection of programs that perform specific tasks. Engineers incorporate libraries into their projects so they don't have to write the programs themselves, to save development time.