; Date: Wed Mar 11 2020

Tags: Bootstrap

The Bootstrap is working on the Bootstrap v5 release, and the team recently committed changes to drop support for at least IE10 (and possibly IE11). Judging by pull requests, their plan to drop the requirement to use jQuery has been a long time coming. On the one hand it is heart-warming to see Internet Explorer finally be dropped from support, and on the other hand we recognize the necessity of letting go of tools that have outlived their usefulness. Finally we'll note that the predicted release date for Bootstrap v5 is "late spring 2020".

The most interesting piece of news is the prediction that Bootstrap v5 will be released in a few months. Front-end-engineers probably have a question in the back of their mind - when will Bootstrap v5 come out, and what changes will be required? More practically they might be scratching their head trying to remember the last time Bootstrap was updated since it's been so long.

Progress is looking really good on the official Github project tracking board with 686 tasks being shipped and roughly 35 more pending or being in review. Taking in consideration that they’re already working on the alpa-2 and alpha-3 versions, we can expect Bootstrap 5 to be released in late spring this year. -- Themesberg blog (link below)

That might be optimistic? Note that this prediction is coming from an author writing for a blog associated with a company providing themes for Bootstrap, and not from the Bootstrap project itself. The Bootstrap blog does not have any recent status update for Bootstrap v5.

For a tutorial looking at post-jQuery application development see: Single page multi-user application with Express, Bootstrap v5, Socket.IO, Sequelize

The expected changes include:

• Removing jQuery
• Dropping support for IE 10
• Custom SVG icon library
• Switching to Hugo from Jekyll
• Major Javascript updates
• Minor CSS and class updates and fixes

Source:

• Bootstrap 5 release date and what's new about it
• Reddit: Boostrap 5: Removing JQuery & dropping IE 10 & 11 support

Removing the jQuery requirement from Bootstrap v5

In my mind this is the big piece of news. Since the beginning Bootstrap required using jQuery, and surely was using jQuery internally. Looking through the Pull Requests, I see several related to dropping jQuery dating back well over a year.

This change will open the possibility for using Bootstrap in Vue.js and React applications. It's known that Vue.js cannot work with Bootstrap because of its jQuery dependency.

Since jQuery has been on the front-end development seen for well over 10 years, it is sad to see a major tool dropping jQuery. Many say that jQuery is no longer needed because of improvements to JavaScript and HTML5 and the DOM specifications. At the time jQuery was created because it simplified DOM manipulations. But in truth we'd all be better off if the same functionality were simply baked into the infrastructure rather than requiring an addon like jQuery.

Therefore - dropping jQuery is a recognition that current JavaScript and HTML does not require it.

Dropping IE10 and IE11 support in Bootstrap v5

I've been around long enough to remember the pain inflicted on the Internet by Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser. In my mind, I'm pronouncing it Internet Exploiter while writing the letters "Internet Explorer".

It is utterly excellent to see Internet Exploiter support being dropped by yet another tool. Unlike my sad longing to see jQuery dropped, dropping Internet Explorer support causes joy.

Bootstrap team has developed a custom SVG icon library

In Bootstrap v3 they'd incorporated an icon library from a third party. That was very useful. However for v4 they dropped that library and came up with a list of recommended icon libraries.

Their preferred list of icon libraries are:

• Font Awesome
• Feather
• Octicons

An additional set were described as looking promising, but they hadn't fully tested them:

• Bytesize
• Google Material icons
• Ionicons
• Dripicons
• Ikons
• Icons8

The Bootstrap Icons library is already available and can be used by any front-end framework (not just Bootstrap).

Switching from Jekyll to Hugo

That's just about changing how they build the website. Given that I use my own static website builder ( AkashaCMS) I'm not up-to-speed on the difference. The Hugo website says it is blazingly fast.

JavaScript and CSS

Because of dropping jQuery as a dependency, the JavaScript side of Bootstrap required a lot of changes.

The CSS side has not received as many changes. From a front-end-engineer perspective it sounds as if we'll code with Bootstrap v5 about the same as we do for Bootstrap v4.

There is a preview page for Bootstrap v5 that gives a sense of what's coming up. A few things were renamed. A surprising thing is that the Jumbotron component has been dropped.