Less.js – a CSS preprocessor

Today, Jordan Theriault introduced Less.js in the OSD600 class. Less.js gets popular recently. It is a CSS framework working with Javascript in client-side. I started to learn and use it when I worked Mobile Webmaker project.

Less.js have some advantages:

• Improve performance. The purpose of Less.js is to speed up development of CSS. So using Less.js can improve performance in ways that can’t be done in normal CSS.
• Significantly reduce sizes of style sheet files by well grouping things. Using Less.js, .css files can be well grouped and be separated into smaller and more meaningful .less files.
• Easiness to operate. Less.js has following features:

·         Ability to define variables,

·         Operations and functions (Mathematical functions and operational functions)

·         Mixins, embedding all the properties of a class into another class

·         Nesting

·         Joining of multiple files.

Those features of Less.js make it easy to operate to group things and generate CSS files. Moreover, the developers are easy to modify .less files with those features by reducing the redundancy of the code.

In the future, I will dig deeper into Less.js with continuously working in Mobile Webmaker project.

Source:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8276154/less-and-sass-vs-traditional-css-methods-and-thoughts-on-performance-and-seo-etc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Less_(stylesheet_language)

http://blog.blakesimpson.co.uk/read/37-less-sass-the-advantages-of-css-preprocessing-explained