For the last few days I have used Twitter’s Bootstrap framework to build a couple of pages. It is responsive to screen widths (mostly) and can conform to HTML 5 practices. I found it to be a bit heavy on the div tags and classes but there are plenty of tutorials out there to guide you. The framework has a robust CSS and Javascript library which can be customized if you don’t need all the features. The customization allows you to specify the grid settings, Typograhy, CSS, and Javascript sprites and JQuery plugins you want. Note you must download JQuery separately and place the calls for it before your bootstrap.js.
I added my own layer of css which allowed me to override some of the default styles to my liking. I used some simple PHP includes to manage items that were reusabale between pages and for a form submission. I also restructed the Header area so that my site branding was not inline in the NAV menu. Instead of div,div,div for the header structure I used more html5 symantic tags of header, nav, ul, with the appropriate boot strap classes.
I like the framework for simple structural sites that need a bit of javascript horsepower to function and it will compete with Dreamweaver’s responsive fluid default file layout tools. I need to learn when the Javascript/JQuery code is not needed to reduce the size of the framework.
If you like or dislike the Bootstrap Framework, feel free to add your comments.
