Saturday, June 11, 2011

A new addition to my skills. LESS Css

After a very long duration i found some time for myself. This i spent in learning and improving my skills. I learnt a "NOT SO COMPLEX" yet a very useful framework related to CSS called LESS - The dynamic stylesheet language

The idea behind this is pretty straight...to apply fund-as of OOP such re-usability to CSS to make CSS writing a very easy and less time consuming task. The code that you write will be stored in a file with ".less" extension.


Now How to use this file?


There are two ways of using LESS. One is server side where you use a LESS compiler to compile the .less files into proper CSS. (This requires ruby installation). and other is client side usage where you get a "less.js" file which will compile the less file for when loaded in browser. I haven't tried the server part yet but it seems quite easy to use as client.


About the language


Dont worry about any learning curve at all!! people who are good at CSS will find that its just like an addon to that language. Honestly it just took me like a day to learn and implement a few examples of this. The syntax and reference has been provided on the site itself. Additionally the code is also available on github too.
The framework not only converts less file into css but also performs optimizations for it like rearranging properties and compressing and minifying the code.
Its a great language to use if you wish to speed up your designing work.