Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Bootstrap : Programmer's Friendly Web Front-end Framework

I had task recently to port some web content into a mobile App. I translated some web-navigation navigation into native mobile one. For example, some section listing is translated into TableView in iOS. However, for the content pages itself I need to basically put the HTML content into an offline-bundled resources within the App.

Below is some problem with the task :

  • The Desktop version link to various online Javascript and CSS resources
  • The layout is for desktop and need to be made more mobile-friendly
It will be time consuming to try to proceed without some kind of reusable solution. After some research I settled with using Bootstrap to help with the it. It's a web front-end framework that bundle some Javascript and CSS into a convenient package. My plan is to offload the script/style to it so I can focus on porting the content.

The content of bootstrap pretty much suffice for the current typical need for multi-device HTML rendering. At least with it I can port the existing Desktop-based content pretty quickly for offline mobile consumption. The styling and layout is already fit out-of-the box to my need. I can strip the existing Javascript and CSS references and make the content use things from Bootstrap. There is still some labor work on the porting but doing on top of a good foundation makes it more manageable.


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