LESS Article

Introduction

LESS stands for Leaner Style Sheets. It is a backwards-compatible language extension for CSS as well as being a dynamic preprocessor style sheet language that can be compiled into CSS and run on the client side or server side.

It was designed by Alexis Sellier and first appeared in 2009. It is open source (the first version was written in Ruby, however subsequent versions have been written in JavaScript).

LESS has been influenced by CSS and SASS and has influenced Bootstrap, SASS and LESS Framework.

Features

Just like SASS, LESS provides more dynamic and complex features in styling such as: Variables, Mixins, Operators, Nesting and functions. It is similar to SASS.

There are other features such as Merging, which allows for aggregating values from multiples properties into a comma or space separated list uner a single proprty, merge is useful for properties such as background and transform.

A user can also import JavaScript plugins to add LESS functions and features, this makes LESS much more powerful to work with and in turn can work with other JS libraries.

LESS is cross-browser compatible as well as being compact and is technically a superset of CSS

Pros/Cons

LESS has its pros and cons:

Pros	Cons
LESS provides cross-browser compatibility that can be used to run in any browser.	If someone is new to using CSS preprocessors then it is very difficult for them to learn LESS.
Importing the external files is the main advantage of using LESS.	LESS provides fewer frameworks as compared to older preprocessors.
Dynamic features such as Nexting, makes it easier to write the code and make it use less lines.	You have to compile LESS - You will have to be using LESS on your local machine and just deploy the generated CSS line. It requires a program to take your LESS files and generate CSS from it.
It is written in JS and you can also interact with it with JS.	Not Necessary - LESS is a tool, but not really a necessity. It can be a real time saver for some teams, but not any benefit for others. Less does save time however and it just prints the CSS code (similar to SASS).

Extra Programs

Websites to display your code such as CodePen and GitHub.
Similar CSS Technologies - Stylus, CSS, SASS.
Frameworks such as Bootstrap, Foundation, Boilerplate.
Front-end Web Technologies such as HTML, JS.
Other Front-end Technologies such as ReactJS, VueJS, Angular
Interacting end technologies such as Node.js

Sources

Summary

In conclusion:

LESS is an awesome technology to work with - It saves time on styling webpages and is better suited to web programmers. However there are drawbacks, such as the fact that you need an extra program to use to compile it (or you can go on codepen - it has the feature built in) into CSS code, and it is also not necessary, but still useful.