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Less CSS - how CSS should have been!

posted under category: Standards on July 25, 2009 by Nathan

Has anyone else seen Less - Leaner CSS? Let me sum it up for you. It goes like this:

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE W3C?

And you can take that one to the bank.


Seriously though, Less is an app built in Ruby that lets you write CSS in a reasonable fashion, which it will compile into unreasonable standard CSS.

And what is reasonable for CSS? Where is it that the W3C has failed us so terribly? Less' feature set says it all: variables, mixins, nested rules and operations. You'll probably have to see it to believe it, but once you see it, you'll get it. Go ahead, visit the Less CSS site, just the home page shows you everything.

My only problem with it is that it's Ruby. I don't have anything in particular against Ruby, I just don't want to install it or figure out how to use it to start coding with Less.

So where does that leave me?

1) Rewrite it in a language I like more
2) Suck it up, use Ruby
3) Recompile it with jRuby
4) Run it with HotRuby (translate into Javascript)

Until then, I guess I will just be dreaming about it.

Nathan is a software developer at The Boeing Company in Charleston, SC. He is essentially a big programming nerd. Really, you could say that makes him a nerd among nerds. Aside from making software for the web, he plays with tech toys and likes to think about programming's big picture while speaking at conferences and generally impressing people with massive nerdiness and straight-faced sarcastic humor. Nathan got his programming start writing batch files in DOS. It should go without saying, but these thought and opinions have nothing to do with Boeing in any way.
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