Less is an open source, dynamic style sheet language. It is a CSS preprocessor which is an extension of CSS. It looks similar to CSS but provides functionalities like variables, functions, operations, and mixins to build dynamic CSS. It was designed and written by Alexis Sellier in 2009.
Features of Less:
1. Processing:
It is one of the most popular Cascading Style Sheets preprocessors which is widely deployed in many front-end frameworks like Bootstrap. It supports for client side processing.
2. Installation:
It is written in JavaScript and it runs on either node.js or web browser. GUI compilation on Less is based on WinLess and LESS.app.
3. Extension:
It has numerous extensions and some of the extensions of Less are Cascading Style Sheets3 (Mixins: LESS Elements, preboot, LESS Mixins), Grid:960.gs (Frameless, semantic.gs), Layout: Even.less and Misc: Twitter Bootstrap.
4. Variables:
It provides variables for faster maintenance. Less variables are defined with a symbol @ and the values are assigned with a colon (:).
5. Nesting:
Nesting makes the code to follow some visual hierarchy. It organizes the code in a specific way.
6. Declaration of Mixins:
A mixin is a collection of CSS properties. The mixins of Less includes characteristics from a ruleset to the other. It is defined with a class selector.
7. Inheritance of Mixins:
It does not support inheritance. Instead of Inheritance, it supports a special “guarded mixin”. These guarded mixins can be implemented under few conditions only.