Switching from SCSS to LESS

[ehelms]

I have been kicking around the idea of moving away from SCSS and to LESS. SCSS made sense when we were a project focused on providing everything via a Rails engine and using Compass for the cross-browser functionality.

The pros and cons as I see them:

Pros:

• LESS is a pure JS implementation, and thus would remove the Ruby requirement on our components
• LESS is used by Bootstrap, which might make it easier for developers wanting to utilize both our work and their styling
• LESS has Ruby/Rails and Python/Django adapters making it more universal
• LESS has the same concepts as SCSS in the large, and some projects to provide the same functionality as Compass (see LessHat)

Cons:

• requires converting our current SCSS code and managing that conversion across components

[jtomasek]

+1, https://github.com/clearleft/clearless seems also very promissing. Recommended in the comments here: http://designshack.net/articles/css/battle-of-the-less-mixin-libraries-less-elements-vs-less-hat-vs-bootstrap/

[jcoufal]

+1 for change to LESS and +1 for ClearLess, I was thinking about Less Hat, but it seems that ClearLess is bigger player (also based on github statistics)

[jtomasek]

I was thinking about this a bit more and considering that Ruby, compass and scss are the development-only requirements (correct me if I am wrong), we should really consider if the rewriting of the whole project into less is worth loosing the compass framework, which still seems superior to all the less alternatives.

[ehelms]

We should outline the pros and cons of compass vs the alternatives. Personally, the only compass part I can think of that we use is the cross-browser mixins which I see in other frameworks. The image-path, sprite-path, asset-path portions of compass don't actually work well in practice.