Anybody design with .less ?

[jeremyers1]

Has anybody used .less much with the Genesis framework?

http://lesscss.org/

I would love to see this implemented, but am not sure of the pros and cons of using it....

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Blogger and Author

http://lesscss.org/

[David Chu]

Hi,
I like the "less much" question... very clever. 🙂 Not that I know of. Another guy asked a couple months ago, and it was so quiet you could hear the tumbleweeds tumbling.

As a CSS geek, I am a little intrigued by LESS and some of the other CSS pre-processors, but not enough to go for it. I can, however, think of some contexts it might be really good for. Gigantic sites, with reams of CSS, might benefit from having the variables, mixins, and all that fun stuff. For hideously complex CSS, (I'm looking at you, Woo Themes), having it LESS-ed might make it more manageable, although the conversion would be a big chore.

CSS people are notoriously opinionated, though. I used to help out on one of the big CSS forums, until it got so nasty that I ditched them. It's not necessarily personality defects, but possibly because there are 10 ways of doing any one thing, so arguments naturally arise, and all the schoolmarms start to barkin'. 😉

Because of this, I don't think you'd ever get agreement on whether to bake this into Genesis. I'd be against it. Not when there are already a bunch of plugins for it that you could painlessly try. And IMO, deciding to use LESS is a general website question, not really specific to WordPress or Genesis. But I'm quite sure you could set up LESS with Genesis, and it would work fine, just like regular CSS does.

I would try the same question on Twitter, with appropriate hash tags. 🙂 Then again, maybe someone will chime in.

Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[jeremyers1]

Thanks, David.

I am primarily interested in mixins. Maybe I don't need the entire .less framework for this...

But as you say, maybe it is not needed at all, since the Genesis css is pretty straightforward and simple (which is part of its genius).

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Blogger and Author

[David Chu]

Jeremy,
If you do end up using it, I'd be interested in seeing your results. If I had more time to experiment, I'd probably bang out a site with it.

There is one single thing that would make me absolutely cuckoo - I'm pretty sure that Firebug will not work as expected with LESS or SASS, and I'm guessing the Chrome code inspector might not either. Although as I look around, I see there's an extension that will unscrew up Firebug, at least for SASS. 🙂

Vendor prefixes are definitely an annoyance. So for anyone who is seriously in love with CSS3, there's another reason to try LESS or SASS. But I don't use a tremendous amount of CSS3, and frankly, I don't lose sleep over Opera compatibility, for instance. (did I just say that?)

Here's a thoughtful viewpoint on preprocessors in general.

I will say this - the latest Genesis 2.0 Sample Theme's CSS is extremely dialed in! It's so well thought-out that, to me, it's demotivating for using pre-processors. I had used various incarnations of the previous Genesis Sample Themes, and they were good, but I had always felt the need to add a LOT of my own mods. With the new stuff, I barely need to touch it, other than any special touches for a particular design.

I especially appreciate the Genesis code quality when I'm asked to tame some Themeforest monster theme. 🙂

Thanks for getting me to take another look at this issue!
Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

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