Wow, big news for Bootstrap. I think Matt and Jacob realize the huge impact they've made on the web development community and the potential Bootstrap has to become the jQuery of HTML. New developers may begin to ask, "should I learn HTML or Bootstrap?" It's not a far-fetched idea because the same question is sometimes asked by beginners when "deciding between" jQuery and (vanilla) JavaScript. jQuery plugins are ubiquitous and are a large part its success. Bootsnipp (http://bootsnipp.com/) could be the start of a "markup plugin" community. Bootstrap has an impressive ecosystem for a front-end HTML framework and I think that is what sets them apart from the rest. Good luck, guys!
I've begun thinking of Bootstrap as something like a front-end version of WordPress. It has so much potential to lay the foundation for anything web, whether traditional websites or rich web apps.
I entirely agree about the jQuery analogy. There is going to be a huge Bootstrap ecosystem - again similar to WordPress as well as jQuery. It's kind of a problem for the web when this happens, in that it creates the kind of fragmentation the web should ideally avoid, but it's a reality nonetheless that technologies like this are going to be two steps ahead of the standards.
Just seeing the various Bootstrap themes sites is exciting. When I've looked for themes in the past, there are very few focusing on rich HTML5 apps. Mostly just static websites and WordPress stuff. That's just one area which has changed since Bootstrap, as it's now possible to build a theme around standard higher-level constructs.
I like bootstrap, but only for bootstrapping my project...or using it for backend/admin styling. Bootstrap is really just a style guide (with some good styles for layout), however if you've got design comps to work from, it's probably better to make your own style guide. I mean, if they could somehow accomplish making this process easier, then that'd be a game changer: basically less like a framework and more like a library.
EDIT
a good example: If you wanted to rebuild hacker news, would you start with bootstrap? I wouldn't
Off topic - Does anyone here remember the post someone wrote awhile here about how they got a boat load of hits by basically paying attention to what was popular here and then writing about it? Thanks in advance...
Hm, I'll be the asshole and point out something that to me is kind of obvious: Bootstrap isn't mainstream enough to warrant it's own foundation/organization.
Just looking at the caliber of other projects that have gone this way (at the top of my head: Apache, Drupal, Django, Zope...) and looking at Boostrap I don't think it's even close to the userbase/clout needed to pull this off. Even the maintainers of those other projects, successful as they are, tend to have a day job.
I don't know, maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I think it might be a little to early to make this move. Just my 2c.
> Bootstrap isn't mainstream enough to warrant it's own foundation/organization
What do you mean by "not mainstream enough?" Organizations on Github are simply a convenient place to put one or more projects that are collectively worked on by a group of individuals and do not necessarily have a single core maintainer.
I recall, from an issue I was dealing with, that a year ago Twitter didn't really give @mdo and @fat any time to work on bootstrap during normal business hours... yep, here it is https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/377#issuecomment... (edit to fix link)
This is great -- an open source project started within a company, then spun off into its own independent entity. It's really great to see that.
Major kudos to the team and to Twitter for having the generosity to acknowledge a responsibility to the community that extends past their ownership of the project they've created. Thanks. :)
tl;dr: <3, Jacob and I quit Twitter, he's going to Obvious, I'm going to GitHub, it's been amazing, nothing but love, Twitter is great, no ill will, Bootstrap is going to keep going, <3.
First, thanks for the love everyone! Jacob and I love seeing people as excited about the future of Bootstrap as us. We're hopeful that this is just the beginning of it. And now, onto answering some of the questions/comments folks have brought up here thus far.
Jacob left over a month ago and my last day is next Friday (10/5). He's going to Obvious, and (announcing it here for the first time) I'm going to GitHub.
The timing has nothing to do with a disagreement about Bootstrap (seriously, none what so ever), and more to do with us both wanting a change in our own lives for what we do day-to-day. Twitter, the company and product, are both amazing and Jacob and I have worked there for 2.5 years. We're stoked for our next things and we both want to keep working on Bootstrap no matter what. We have an obligation to the community and know it could go much further. (Oh, and yes, I screwed up the date on the post. My bad, yo.)
Bootstrap was created by me at Twitter as a means to make better looking internal tools (I wrote about this on A List Apart awhile back: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/building-twitter-bootstra...). It started off as a simple HTML/CSS thing, then Jacob built plugins on top of it, and we open sourced it together. We made it at Twitter, so when we wanted to open source it, we went to Twitter to ensure it was good to go. Thus, it was named Twitter Bootstrap (originally, "Bootstrap, from Twitter" actually). Now, it's back to just "Bootstrap".
We don't really think of it as the next jQuery, Django, or Drupal. But you can't deny there is something to front-end frameworks like Bootstrap, and that's what we're excited about. HTML and CSS are the two easiest and most basic building blocks of websites. Everyone knows and uses them, and that's a big part of why Bootstrap has grown so much, and can continue to grow more.
No, we weren't "given time" to work on Bootstrap, but that's because it was a project I started on my own to help other engineers. Jacob came in to shape it into a proper open source project and then wrote all the JavaScript plugins (Fun fact: before the jQuery plugins, he wrote a MooTools library on top of it called Tit, which is a type of bird). Anyway, we weren't given time because it wasn't a company priority, naturally, and we're okay with that. We worked on it, at the office or at home, whenever we wanted and folks were generally okay with that as well.
The move to making Bootstrap its own project and organization is a joint one, between myself, Jacob, and Twitter's Open Source team (@cra). The transition will take time, but we need to grow Bootstrap beyond the two of us and Twitter, and into something more. There is really sooooo much potential for making better things on the Web, and we're hoping we can keep that up with the help of the community.
Anyway, we're both stoked to keep working on Bootstrap. It's a great project that can be so much better, and that's pretty damned awesome to us. Twitter has been amazing for both of us and will continue to down the road. We wish nothing but the best for everyone we've worked with.
Foundation Evangelist, ZURB's Chief Instigator here.
As a leader, it's often difficult to see your hard working employees move on to other opportunities. And you hope deep down that the lessons they learn from you along the way will be remembered as influencial in their career. Mark had a great run at ZURB before Twitter. I wish him the best.
For ZURB's current employees, and the ones that put thinking into developing Foundation, it's important for me to make sure they receive credit for the contributions they have made to the design community that extend beyond what Mark remember's Bootstrap to be (or wants it to be) or what Foundation has become. The first iteration of Bootstrap emerged from the work ZURB did over the last few years prototyping with our clients. In fact, the initial Bootstrap push had direct lines of code and copy taken from ZURB's work on what today is Foundation 1.0.
When you see Mark's history conveniently rewritten as "I developed Bootstrap," it's important for me to make sure that those who contributed to it's initial core from ZURB are recognized. There were many ZURBians who put countless hours into writing code and laying down the vision for a css framework before Mark "envisioned" this solution for his Twitter engineers. Talented designers at ZURB even shared that vision with Mark as part of our refinement of Foundation 2.0 before it was launched.
Foundation (http://foundation.zurb.com) is fine and kicking and we benefit from the global awareness of css-frameworks. ZURB is quite happy about that and we'll continue to evolve our solution to benefit the community. I want to make sure talented product designers like Jonathan Smiley and Matt Kelly, who helped envisioned the idea, get credit for their contributions for making stuff like this possible. These guys are my heroes and I hope that you see that as well in the code they write and share.
markdotto: you may not think of Bootstrap as "the next JQuerym, Django, or Drupal," but to me (and many others here, I'm sure), it's already a de facto standard for building web app UIs. THANK YOU, and congratulations on the recent move to you and Jacob.
After also reading this: http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2012/09/29/onward/ I still don't get what this actually means for the future of BS, is it good news, or bad news, is everyone too polite?
Good to be remembered here of Foundation again. I was recently asked for BS alternatives and couldn't named any.
All the best two you both. I can say with certainty that many people in the web dev world love BS and are continuing to eagerly await new changes that will come as a result of the moves.
Thank you for bootstrap, its a very wonderful tool.It's success is evident from the large developer community.With tools like jets rap and bootsnip , this is just the beginning.
Great Otto, thanks and thanks for the Framework, is just perfect for starting to create valids, flexible, fast and responsive websites.
Good days at Github :)
Thanks for the Bootstrap! Been using it for a while now and having fun with it. I never tried front-end framework before but Bootstrap made my life easier!
Just speculating here, but this doesn't exactly sound like it was blessed by Twitter: "Bootstrap will remain a Twitter project on GitHub for the time being, but we've realized the project has grown beyond us and the Twitter brand."
If this was something Twitter believed too, I imagine there would be some fanfare around this, Twitter helping FLOSS and all that.
You have to take a pragmatic perspective here as well. I'd wager that the only reason Bootstrap is a Twitter project to begin with is because of the assignment clause of most employment agreements: If you develop something at a company, the company owns it.
I can't imagine any managers at Twitter were sitting there thinking "Hey, I have this great idea that will make us boatloads of money! Let's release an open-source html/css/js framework that makes it super easy for anyone to make a site that looks like Twitter."
In all likelihood, it was a project that the developers wrote for internal ops and later attempted (and succeeded) to open source. If you look at the Impact Graph on github (https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/graphs/impact), you can see that it's pretty much Jacob and Mark's project.
From Twitter's perspective, they can either let Jacob and Mark continue to run with it at no real cost to themselves (since it's open source and they can still use Bootstrap), or they can try to find someone within the organization to continue to maintain it, which has a very real cost -- developer time. Given that they may not find someone to fill that role and that forcing someone into it would probably be bad for the project, I think the decision makes a lot of sense for Twitter.
It sounds to me like the two guys left twitter and have decided to continue work on bootstrap. Being open source is there a reason they can't? I don't know much regarding the rules of open source but is it possible they could just fork it and continue where they left off (without twitters blessing)?
It's interesting that they both left at the same time. There must have been an internal disagreement about their role in relation to Bootstrap--or perhaps Twitter is just a really sad place to work these days.
I really hope they can move to bootstrap full / part time and really kickstart it into something that merges bootswatch with wrapbootstrap.. I want to give bootstrap money.. this is a good step :)
Hopefully their newfound time won't lead to unnecessary bloat for what is currently a beautiful framework. Keep it simple, keep it small, keep it clean.
I wished there would have been something like Bootstrap 10-12 years ago. As a developer it would have made my life a lot easier. Since design is not really my area of expertise, I often struggled to make a decent backend/administration area for my applications. I started to use Bootstrap recently and can't believe how much fun it is to use and how much quicker I'm getting results.
With all of the great extensions people have developed for Bootstrap so far, It's clear that they're really on to something. I can't wait to see what direction they take it in after severing ties with Twitter.
Is it only me or does anyone else have an issue with the name "Bootstrap"?
I've now gone through multiple tutorials where the term is used to refer to Bootstrap from twitter or the general idea of bootstrapping an app.
Now each time I read "bootstrap" I've to establish the context which gets especially tricky when the same documentation or tutorial uses both Bootstrap from Twitter and the verb "to bootstrap".
Bootstrap badly needs a really good tutorial. I'm thinking of making one, if anybody wants to help out, my email address is in my profile.
I was thinking I'd build a simple and attractive site from scratch and make the tutorial a step-by-step of how it was done, so even somebody with no HTML or CSS experience could do it - but also so that even experienced programmers would quickly learn all sorts of cool things that Bootstrap can do.
This is how I'm learning Rails right now - the Rails tutorial is amazing. Bootstrap needs something similar.
Yes! Bootstrap has some hierarchy things you have to pick up on to get desired effects. Some kind of guide would be nice. I'm not sure if they've updated it since but a few months ago I was building a layout and had to resort to the inspector tool to figure out the exact way they did things in the examples.
[+] [-] coderdude|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmahemoff|13 years ago|reply
I entirely agree about the jQuery analogy. There is going to be a huge Bootstrap ecosystem - again similar to WordPress as well as jQuery. It's kind of a problem for the web when this happens, in that it creates the kind of fragmentation the web should ideally avoid, but it's a reality nonetheless that technologies like this are going to be two steps ahead of the standards.
Just seeing the various Bootstrap themes sites is exciting. When I've looked for themes in the past, there are very few focusing on rich HTML5 apps. Mostly just static websites and WordPress stuff. That's just one area which has changed since Bootstrap, as it's now possible to build a theme around standard higher-level constructs.
[+] [-] bertomartin|13 years ago|reply
EDIT a good example: If you wanted to rebuild hacker news, would you start with bootstrap? I wouldn't
[+] [-] johnx123-up|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanmalarkey|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dguaraglia|13 years ago|reply
Just looking at the caliber of other projects that have gone this way (at the top of my head: Apache, Drupal, Django, Zope...) and looking at Boostrap I don't think it's even close to the userbase/clout needed to pull this off. Even the maintainers of those other projects, successful as they are, tend to have a day job.
I don't know, maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I think it might be a little to early to make this move. Just my 2c.
[+] [-] th|13 years ago|reply
What do you mean by "not mainstream enough?" Organizations on Github are simply a convenient place to put one or more projects that are collectively worked on by a group of individuals and do not necessarily have a single core maintainer.
[+] [-] jscheel|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpadvo|13 years ago|reply
Major kudos to the team and to Twitter for having the generosity to acknowledge a responsibility to the community that extends past their ownership of the project they've created. Thanks. :)
[+] [-] markdotto|13 years ago|reply
tl;dr: <3, Jacob and I quit Twitter, he's going to Obvious, I'm going to GitHub, it's been amazing, nothing but love, Twitter is great, no ill will, Bootstrap is going to keep going, <3.
First, thanks for the love everyone! Jacob and I love seeing people as excited about the future of Bootstrap as us. We're hopeful that this is just the beginning of it. And now, onto answering some of the questions/comments folks have brought up here thus far.
Jacob left over a month ago and my last day is next Friday (10/5). He's going to Obvious, and (announcing it here for the first time) I'm going to GitHub.
The timing has nothing to do with a disagreement about Bootstrap (seriously, none what so ever), and more to do with us both wanting a change in our own lives for what we do day-to-day. Twitter, the company and product, are both amazing and Jacob and I have worked there for 2.5 years. We're stoked for our next things and we both want to keep working on Bootstrap no matter what. We have an obligation to the community and know it could go much further. (Oh, and yes, I screwed up the date on the post. My bad, yo.)
Bootstrap was created by me at Twitter as a means to make better looking internal tools (I wrote about this on A List Apart awhile back: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/building-twitter-bootstra...). It started off as a simple HTML/CSS thing, then Jacob built plugins on top of it, and we open sourced it together. We made it at Twitter, so when we wanted to open source it, we went to Twitter to ensure it was good to go. Thus, it was named Twitter Bootstrap (originally, "Bootstrap, from Twitter" actually). Now, it's back to just "Bootstrap".
We don't really think of it as the next jQuery, Django, or Drupal. But you can't deny there is something to front-end frameworks like Bootstrap, and that's what we're excited about. HTML and CSS are the two easiest and most basic building blocks of websites. Everyone knows and uses them, and that's a big part of why Bootstrap has grown so much, and can continue to grow more.
No, we weren't "given time" to work on Bootstrap, but that's because it was a project I started on my own to help other engineers. Jacob came in to shape it into a proper open source project and then wrote all the JavaScript plugins (Fun fact: before the jQuery plugins, he wrote a MooTools library on top of it called Tit, which is a type of bird). Anyway, we weren't given time because it wasn't a company priority, naturally, and we're okay with that. We worked on it, at the office or at home, whenever we wanted and folks were generally okay with that as well.
The move to making Bootstrap its own project and organization is a joint one, between myself, Jacob, and Twitter's Open Source team (@cra). The transition will take time, but we need to grow Bootstrap beyond the two of us and Twitter, and into something more. There is really sooooo much potential for making better things on the Web, and we're hoping we can keep that up with the help of the community.
Anyway, we're both stoked to keep working on Bootstrap. It's a great project that can be so much better, and that's pretty damned awesome to us. Twitter has been amazing for both of us and will continue to down the road. We wish nothing but the best for everyone we've worked with.
<3
[+] [-] chiefinstigator|13 years ago|reply
As a leader, it's often difficult to see your hard working employees move on to other opportunities. And you hope deep down that the lessons they learn from you along the way will be remembered as influencial in their career. Mark had a great run at ZURB before Twitter. I wish him the best.
For ZURB's current employees, and the ones that put thinking into developing Foundation, it's important for me to make sure they receive credit for the contributions they have made to the design community that extend beyond what Mark remember's Bootstrap to be (or wants it to be) or what Foundation has become. The first iteration of Bootstrap emerged from the work ZURB did over the last few years prototyping with our clients. In fact, the initial Bootstrap push had direct lines of code and copy taken from ZURB's work on what today is Foundation 1.0.
When you see Mark's history conveniently rewritten as "I developed Bootstrap," it's important for me to make sure that those who contributed to it's initial core from ZURB are recognized. There were many ZURBians who put countless hours into writing code and laying down the vision for a css framework before Mark "envisioned" this solution for his Twitter engineers. Talented designers at ZURB even shared that vision with Mark as part of our refinement of Foundation 2.0 before it was launched.
Foundation (http://foundation.zurb.com) is fine and kicking and we benefit from the global awareness of css-frameworks. ZURB is quite happy about that and we'll continue to evolve our solution to benefit the community. I want to make sure talented product designers like Jonathan Smiley and Matt Kelly, who helped envisioned the idea, get credit for their contributions for making stuff like this possible. These guys are my heroes and I hope that you see that as well in the code they write and share.
[+] [-] cs702|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] franklaemmer|13 years ago|reply
After also reading this: http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2012/09/29/onward/ I still don't get what this actually means for the future of BS, is it good news, or bad news, is everyone too polite?
Good to be remembered here of Foundation again. I was recently asked for BS alternatives and couldn't named any.
[+] [-] francov88|13 years ago|reply
Best of luck at Github, huge win for you both.
[+] [-] boscomutunga|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] montogeek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MojoJolo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wilfra|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tubbo|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] andrewljohnson|13 years ago|reply
If this was something Twitter believed too, I imagine there would be some fanfare around this, Twitter helping FLOSS and all that.
More to this story?
[+] [-] _rknLA|13 years ago|reply
I can't imagine any managers at Twitter were sitting there thinking "Hey, I have this great idea that will make us boatloads of money! Let's release an open-source html/css/js framework that makes it super easy for anyone to make a site that looks like Twitter."
In all likelihood, it was a project that the developers wrote for internal ops and later attempted (and succeeded) to open source. If you look at the Impact Graph on github (https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/graphs/impact), you can see that it's pretty much Jacob and Mark's project.
From Twitter's perspective, they can either let Jacob and Mark continue to run with it at no real cost to themselves (since it's open source and they can still use Bootstrap), or they can try to find someone within the organization to continue to maintain it, which has a very real cost -- developer time. Given that they may not find someone to fill that role and that forcing someone into it would probably be bad for the project, I think the decision makes a lot of sense for Twitter.
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] popee|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mratzloff|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] howardr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thehodge|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwf|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cbasedlifeform|13 years ago|reply
Great move away from Twitter. May the winds be forever at your backs.
[+] [-] therealarmen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NameNickHN|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nodesocket|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pearkes|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yagoogaly|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tylerlh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaidf|13 years ago|reply
I've now gone through multiple tutorials where the term is used to refer to Bootstrap from twitter or the general idea of bootstrapping an app.
Now each time I read "bootstrap" I've to establish the context which gets especially tricky when the same documentation or tutorial uses both Bootstrap from Twitter and the verb "to bootstrap".
[+] [-] outside1234|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaequery|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gt5050|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wilfra|13 years ago|reply
I was thinking I'd build a simple and attractive site from scratch and make the tutorial a step-by-step of how it was done, so even somebody with no HTML or CSS experience could do it - but also so that even experienced programmers would quickly learn all sorts of cool things that Bootstrap can do.
This is how I'm learning Rails right now - the Rails tutorial is amazing. Bootstrap needs something similar.
[+] [-] joshmlewis|13 years ago|reply