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(re-)Introducing LESS CSS

posted under category: CSS on August 23, 2011 by Nathan

Foreword: I am giving a LESS CSS talk at the Adobe MAX 2011 ColdFusion Unconference. Blogging about LESS is just one of my stepping stones to presenting. If you want the really good stuff, you should come to my session!

A couple years ago I mentioned the LESS CSS project. I stated one problem with it back then, which was the dependence on Ruby. Creator Alexis Sellier has since moved the project to Javascript, which opens it up to a lot of possibilities, the most magical being that we can run it from our browsers.

The performance that I have seen so far has been nothing short of instantaneous. Even on IE8, the overhead is nil. If you've seen LESS but had reservations like I did, fear not, because LESS has come to you!

LESS has also been ported to PHP and .NET. It has picked up in popularity and community support, and is turning into a great open source software ecosystem.

So, why would you want to use LESS? It's because it makes CSS think like programmers do. Set a variable, Call a function, include a file, these are just the start to the kinds of things you can do when you use LESS CSS.

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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