Exciting advancements in CSS from lesscss.org
CSS has always been a strangely beautiful but notoriously static and redundant language. LESS CSS has tackled this problem head on introducing a variety of programing concepts that will vastly improve the experience of writing and maintaining css. They also have a great logo.
The main ideas include:
- variables,
- 'mixins' (embedding definitions in other definitions as variables),
- embedding (explicitly declaring definitions in definitions) and
- mathematical operations.
Introducing these concepts into css would vastly improve the css experience. Unfortunately, Less has ony implemented them as a Ruby Gem, which is not useful to me and my PHP ways. I applaud them none the less and hope that the PHP community will respond with a solution.
For large or complex sites, there's not been any straight forward way of getting around writing huge or many .css files each of which repeats colors, styles and properties for many similar but different classes and page elements. Sure, semantics goes a long way but raises problems sometimes, as does thoughtful nesting and clean use of classes, but, lets face it, reality doesn't allow for optimized css. This is one of those things where you have to compromise any ideals you may be harboring or consine yourself to non-productive insanity.
Another interesting angle on Less is that it sidesteps the biggest barrier to the advancement of css: browser compatibility. The pre-processing, in effect, is a compiler for a meta-css language. So, more kudos to Less for finding a way around the beast of multi-browser issues (aka: ie 6 should have been shipped with an auto-updater.)