What is Less?.
Less (Leaner Style Sheets; sometimes stylized as LESS) is a dynamic preprocessor stylesheet language that can be compiled into Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and run on the client side or server side. LESS is a CSS pre-processor that enables customizable, manageable and reusable style sheet for website, extends the capability of CSS and is also cross browser friendly.
| Maintained by | License Type | Popular Examples | Support | Updates | Developer Skills |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Less team | Apache License 2 | – | lesscss.org/usage | Supported for at least one year beyond the next major version release. | Html5, Css3 and Javascript support on yearly basis |
| Often Compared to | Testing | Accessibility | Maintained by | Repository |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Complier, Saas | Sandbox | – | Less team | lesscss.org/ |
Pros:
- Lightweight feature set, it is syntactically similar to CSS and run on client side
- The syntax is essentially the same as CSS with extensions for dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions.
- Less is written in JS, it can be processed on client side making the set-up easy
Cons:
- Less currently has limited support.
- Does not offer custom functions and instead requires the use of mixins
- It does not have loop and conditionals block