Strap In For Bootstrap
26 Feb 2026
Early Beginnings
Hypertext Markup Language or more commonly known as HTML, has been one of my favorite things to learn in all of my college classes. Actually, the first time I picked up this language was in my junior year of high school. I remember making a little homepage website for a school project. I don’t really remember the product, but I do remember it being pretty easy, and that I understood the basics pretty well. Now, in college, I admit I felt pretty rusty at first but after working and practicing I feel that I came back to where I was before, maybe even a little better.
There are a lot of things about HTML that made something really click for me. First of all, everything about HTML is easily testable. If you open up the website as a live preview, which is a very useful tool when working with HTML, you may see your changes in real time. This tool has made it so I can test tags, sizes, padding, colors, every design that I may want to implement can easily be seen then deleted or kept all in the typing of a few words. Another thing about HTML is how simple it is. It is very easy to make your text blue, to make something a link, to make the background a picture of your favorite cat meme. HTML is the paintbrush and canvas for us computer science students and I love actually getting to use this level of creativity within one of my computer science classes for once.
8 vs 100 Lines?
Bootstrap I will admit, had me pretty confused at first. The syntax in of itself had me pretty confused and for a second had me missing raw HTML for a moment. Then I realized, the reason why I may have thought HTML to be so easy before is because I have never tried to make a large-scale website for professional uses. Bootstrap, even though confusing, saves a lot of time. Instead of having to make a whole entity within your css, you use a strand of words to do the exact same thing. It provides an answer template for us to use and adjust for problems we would normally have with raw HTML.
Going back to the heading of this section. Something that can be done in maybe 8 div’s in your regular HTML may take 100 lines in your CSS to do in raw HTML. Not only the initial writing aspect, but the maintenance and the debugging. That means more lines to look at and or change if there’s a change wanted by your manager. With Bootstrap a lot of the formatting can be done in just a single line, it’s all a matter of learning which syntax does what.
Software Engineers and UI Framework?
Other than the saving time aspect, what else could Bootstrap or other UI frameworks do for you? First of all, maintainability. All the developers of a website will use the same spacing rules, name conventions, layout expectations due to the implementation of frameworks. Also if there were ever no comments around what a specific division does, developers fluent with Bootstrap syntax should know what simple items such as “align-items-center” do. If everyone knows what everything does, then it make for easier collaboration. Unlike algorithms where there are multiple implementations for the same method.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, I am excited to learn more about HTMl, CSS, and UI Frameworks. The reintroduction of these topics have helped me relight the creative fire that has been burnt out for quite a time.