14 DAY TRIAL // It's hard to deny that open source, as an idea, has left a big mark on many of the big or up-and-coming web companies of today. Facebook, Twitter and many others used open source technologies to get started quickly and later moved to release their own open source tools, once they had the time and resources to develop custom technology.
Twitter Bootstrap is a perfect example of that, it's the latest tool Twitter has released to the public under an open source license.
Twitter Bootstrap is a CSS framework of sorts, it's designed to enable developers to easily and quickly add a CSS style to their applications that both looks good and is guaranteed to work on all modern browsers.
"We are happy to announce Bootstrap, a front-end toolkit for rapidly developing web applications. It is a collection of CSS and HTML conventions," Twitter's Mark Otto announced over the weekend.
"It uses some of the latest browser techniques to provide you with stylish typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation and everything else you need in a super tiny (only 6k with gzip) resource," he explained.
The people who are going to find Boostrap the most useful are developers who want to give their apps or sites a professional look without messing about too much with CSS code and without the help of a dedicated designer.
For this, Bootstrap provides a number of commonly used layouts as well as a fairly standard 940 pixel grid. There are some customization options and Twitter says the framework is rather flexible.
There are some alternatives to Boostrap, though not all may be direct replacements, but the tool is free and open source and it's got Twitter behind it.
Its engineers are going to continue to work on it, since it's used extensively at the company, and it's probably going to get more browser compatibility testing than your average open source tool of this type.