Bootstrap's popularity as a front-end web development framework is easy to understand. It provides a palette of user-friendly, cross-browser, tested solutions for most standard UI conventions. Its ready-made, community-tested, combination of HTML markup, CSS styles, and JavaScript plugins greatly accelerates the task of developing a frontend web interface, and it yields a pleasing result out of the gate. With the fundamental elements quickly in place, we can customize the design on top of a solid foundation.

Bootstrap uses Grunt for its CSS and JavaScript build system, and Jekyll for the written documentation. Grunt is a JavaScript task runner for Node.js. Other tools and technologies can also be used to build Bootstrap. In this book you will get introduced to some alternative solutions to build Bootstrap.

But not all that is popular, efficient, and effective is good. Too often, a handy tool can generate and reinforce bad habits; not so with Bootstrap, at least not necessarily so. Those who have watched it from the beginning know that its first release and early updates have occasionally favored pragmatic efficiency over best practices. The fact is that some best practices, right from semantic markup, to mobile-first design, to performance-optimized assets, require extra time and effort to implement. In this chapter you will get introduced to Bootstrap and will learn:

Creating a solid HTML5 markup structure with many current best practices baked-in