Less (sometimes stylized as
LESS) is a dynamic
style sheet language that can be compiled into
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and run on the client-side or server-side. Designed by Alexis Sellier, Less is influenced by
Sass and has influenced the newer "SCSS" syntax of Sass, which adapted its CSS-like block formatting syntax. Less is
open-source. Its first version was written in
Ruby; however, in the later versions, use of Ruby has been
deprecated and replaced by
JavaScript. The indented syntax of Less is a nested metalanguage, as valid CSS is valid Less code with the same
semantics. Less provides the following mechanisms:
variables, nesting,
mixins,
operators and
functions; the main difference between Less and other CSS precompilers being that Less allows real-time compilation via less.js by the browser.