Twitter Bootstap: Backwards compatibility? [closed]

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I work for a university Digital Services team. Our university's main website uses the Ektron CMS (I have my own thoughts about this, but that's irrelevant). Because we maintain a university website, we need to make sure our website is extremely backwards compatible.

We are trying to make a decision as to whether Twitter Bootstrap is conducive to what we're trying to do. Upon review, I've found that Bootstrap uses the CSS preprocessor "*Less Css*". We're currently using *SASS*, which we compile via terminal using Ruby Compass. The downside I'm wondering about while using *Less Css* would be that it compiles using Rhino and Node.js. Would this create issues because

1. Less CSS uses Node.js to compile; if someone does not have js enabled in their browser, will it not display the CSS?
2. the CSS has to compile each time a page is rendered, will it slow down a pages load time?

What is most appealing to use is the grid system/glyphs/ and js plugins that comes with Bootstrap, which is good because we often have to create new content for events and other things happening in the university. However, it's extremely hard for us to give up cross compatibility.

What are benefits of Bootstrap?
What are draw backs of Bootstrap?

Answer 1

As you can see in the comments above you do not have to use the LESS files and the javascript to compile on every page load. You can download bootstrap with all of the css files already compiled for you.

Also depending on your server environment you can employ different plugins to precompile the css files for you. I see you are using a .NET CMS so you should be able to employ some Visual Studio plugins to help you with this. One such plugin is Mindscape Workbench which supports LESS and SASS (also CoffeeScript). I've never used it but Scott Hanselman seems to like it.

One final thing to consider is that your site needs to be "extremely backwards compatible". I am not sure if you are aware of this but bootstrap no longer supports IE7. If this browser is not necessary then don't worry about it. If it is then you can still use bootstrap but you will be left to write your own IE stylesheets to support bootstrap.